System Administration

Calibrate Your Monitor

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When I build a new computer one of the things I do as part of the setup is calibrate the color of the monitors. It’s actually pretty amazing how much better things look after just a few minutes of adjustments. It’s also nice to have the monitors synchronized, so if I move a window between them it doesn’t change color. I use Microsoft Windows 10 (1703 as of this writing) on all my desktops now, and here’s my process. Apple appears to have a similar calibration tool built in to MacOS, and all my Linux boxes are headless, so you are on your own. Sorry. 1. Reset the monitor(s) to factory settings. On my Dell LCD panels there’s a “Reset …

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Let’s Prosecute Unlicensed Engineering in IT

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Have you been watching this whole dustup with the Equifax CISO, and how people are saying that she is unqualified because, instead of a Computer Science degree, she had an MFA in music composition? Not surprisingly, there’s a massive backlash from the IT community, much of which doesn’t have a computer science degree, either. That’s part of the appeal of technology for many — on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. I’m a mutt, too. I’ve always found computer science programs intentionally inaccessible, with the faculty actively eschewing any form of practical curricula because they’re not a technical college. Snobbish? Yeah. Not my style. What I find very interesting in all of this is the ignorance of some of the …

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Fix WinRM Client Issues

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My team manages a lot of Dell hardware. Over the years we’ve run into situations where we have to replace the system board on a host. The system board’s management interface, iDRAC, has a license key on it, and when you replace the system board it’s helpful if you can export the license key ahead of time. That way you can reimport it again easily without getting your sales team involved to reissue a key. Unfortunately sometimes that’s not possible, such as when the iDRAC management interface is what died (my case today). Turns out that Dell has the “Dell EMC License Manager” (get it from support.dell.com under the Systems Management downloads for your hardware) which you can proactively take …

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The Dangers of Experts Writing Documentation: A Real Life Example

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There are some real, tangible dangers to having experts write documentation. Experts have the perfect tools, skip steps, know where things are based on experience, use jargon, have spare parts so mistakes aren’t a big deal, and as a result make terrible time & work estimates. This leads to confused, and subsequently angry, people, which is probably not what you wanted. I was thinking about all this as I entered my fourth hour of installing a trailer wiring harness on my Mazda CX-9 today. It’s a unit from Curt Manufacturing, kit #56016. When my CX-9 was in the shop for an alignment a few weeks back I had them put a hitch on it. They got squirrelly & weird when …

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Install the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Without Ephemeral Port Groups

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Trying to install VMware vCenter in appliance/VCSA form straight to a new ESXi host? Having a problem where it isn’t listing any networks, and it’s telling you that “Non-ephemeral distributed virtual port groups are not supported” in the little informational bubble next to it? Thinking this is Chicken & Egg 101, because you can’t have an ephemeral port group without a Distributed vSwitch, and you can’t have a dvSwitch without a vCenter, so how do you install vCenter when you need something that only vCenter can create? Yeah, me too. Here’s the secret, though: don’t remove the default “VM Network” port group, or if you did, put it back, and restart the installer (or just back up to select the host …

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How Not To Quit Your Job

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I’ve thought a lot lately about Michael Thomas, a moron who caused criminal amounts of damage to his former employer in the process of quitting. From The Register[0]: As well as deleting ClickMotive’s backups and notification systems for network problems, he cut off people’s VPN access and “tinkered” with the Texas company’s email servers. He deleted internal wiki pages, and removed contact details for the organization’s outside tech support, leaving the automotive software developer scrambling. The real-life BOFH then left his keys, laptop, and entry badge behind with a letter of resignation and an offer to stay on as a consultant. More than a decade ago I did some consulting for a company that had this happen. They fired their sysadmin and …

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Standards, to and with Resolve

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As the holiday season has progressed I’ve spent a bunch of time in the car, traveling three hours at a crack to see friends and family in various parts of Midwestern USA. Much of that travel has been alone, my family having decided to ensconce themselves with my in-laws for the full duration of the week. That has left me ample time to sing aloud in the car, take unplanned detours to collect growlers of beer from esteemed breweries, and to think. I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I’m not against them, per se, but I just think they’re too conveniently abandoned. I like the noun form of “resolve” better — a firm determination to do something. I aspire to …

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Use Microsoft Excel For Your Text Manipulation Needs

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I’m just going to lay it out there: sysadmins should use Microsoft Excel more. I probably will be labeled a traitor and a heathen for this post. It’s okay, I have years of practice having blasphemous opinions on various IT religious beliefs. Do I know how to use the UNIX text tools like sed, awk, xargs, find, cut, and so on? Yes. Do I know how to use regular expressions? Yes. Do I know how to use Perl and Python to manipulate text, and do poor-man’s extract-transform-load sorts of things? Absolutely. It’s just that I rarely need such complicated tools in my daily work. I often just have a short list of something that I need to turn into a bunch of …

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Big Trouble in Little Changes

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I was making a few changes today when I ran across this snippet of code. It bothers me. /bin/mkdir /var/lib/docker /bin/mount /dev/Volume00/docker_lv /var/lib/docker echo “/dev/Volume00/docker_lv /var/lib/docker ext4 defaults 1 2″ >> /etc/fstab “Why does it bother you, Bob?” you might ask. “They’re just mounting a filesystem.” My problem is that any change that affects booting is high risk, because fixing startup problems is a real pain. And until the system reboots the person who executes this won’t know that it works. If it doesn’t work it’ll stop during the boot, sitting there waiting for someone with a root password to come fix it. So you’ll have to get a console on the machine and dig up the root password. Then …

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Interesting Dell iDRAC Tricks

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Deploying a bunch of machines all at once? Know your way around for loops in shell scripts, or Excel enough to do some basic text functions & autofill? You, too, can set up a few hundred servers in one shot. Here’s some interesting things I’ve done in the recent past using the Dell iDRAC out-of-band hardware management controllers. You need to install the racadm utility on your Windows or Linux host. I’ll leave this up to you, but you probably want to look in the Dell Downloads for your server, under “Systems Management.” I recently found it as “Dell OpenManage DRAC Tools, includes Racadm” in 32- and 64-bit flavors. Basic Command The basic racadm command I’ll represent with $racadm from …

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