System Administration

inittab is so 1980s

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“Hey Bob, what do you know about Fedora?” “Plenty. It’s basically just like the Red Hat we use. What can I help you with?” “My PC won’t boot anymore. I upgraded to Fedora Core 5 and then I did some cleanup. Now it’s messed up. Before I rebooted I couldn’t run anything but FTP.” Ah yes, “cleanup.” There are too many files in /etc, I’ll just delete some. Oh, and why would you upgrade to Fedora Core 5, when 6 is available? “Tell me about this cleanup.” “I used RPM to do it. This is what I removed.” He hands me eight printed pages of package names. “Um, dude, why did you remove things like SysVinit, bash, and the kernel? …

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OpenDNS rules

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DNS is one of those services that is fundamental to everything on a computer. As such, I am switching my desktops and workstations to OpenDNS. Why? A) The ability for users to refresh the OpenDNS cache. When I’m moving domains around nothing is more annoying than getting stuck with cached entries. I normally run my own copy of BIND for this reason, but one of my goals for 2007 is to simplify my life, and if OpenDNS will let me refresh the cache I’ll use theirs. Then I don’t need my own BIND. Plus, if I have my customers use OpenDNS then I can fix the cache for them, too. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain …

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Simplification

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I am tired of my email. Over the last ten years I have subscribed to many, many mailing lists. I have procmail filters for about 35 of the most active. You know how many of these 35 mailing lists I actively read? None. Zero. My subscriptions exist to annoy SpamAssassin, add load to mail servers, and consume my disk space. I could just search their indexes online if I ever needed anything from them. I get all my news via RSS now. So I’m done with them. Gone. 35 mailing lists, unsubscribed. Bye. Adios. Seeya. Over the last ten years my coworkers and customers have subscribed me to many, many mailing lists, because I’m their sysadmin. “Please don’t add me …

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How to Write An Outage Notice

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“Service X will be unavailable between 00:00 CST January 4th and 12:00 CST January 5th. We apologize for the inconvenience.” I hate outage notifications that don’t actually say anything. Sure, I’d rather know ahead of time that something is going down, but there are several other qualities that I think any communication like this should have. The key is to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What would you like to know if you were them? Why is this happening? Tell people about the problem you’re having or fixing, and what you’re doing to fix it. Chances are people have noticed the problem already so saying nothing about it seems pretty pointless. Acknowledge the problem and take ownership of it. …

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Warning Phishing Victims?

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We get a lot of phishing spam, and we have to deliver it to our users. Most of it gets classified as spam and moved into the user’s “Junk Mail” folder. However, we’ve got a number of users that have been reporting these scams as “not spam” to us. It’s disturbing, because they don’t trust the spam filters now, and they’re probably clicking the links in the email. Could vendors add a feature to antivirus and spam detection systems (like Sophos’ PureMessage) where we could rewrite the beginning of the email to indicate a scam? Or maybe remove all the URLs from the email message? I see it as an extension of virus detection, only with a different rule set …

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Only emacs can make me feel like an idiot

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Emacs, an editor I never use, seems to have a knack for making me feel like a complete and total idiot every single time I run it. I started it and I am not even sure why, my fingers typing those letters, apparently manifesting some type of subconscious masochism. Sixty seconds later I reveal the depths of my shame and frustration to Google:

How Many IPv6 IPs Does It Take To Hose Linux and VMware?

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I’ve been doing a lot of IPv6 testing lately. My network engineers allocated a /64 to me, which gives me 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 available IPs. My new goal is to use each and every one of those IPs. A few minutes getting my network guys to trunk the right VLANs into my test VMware setup, one “for” loop, “sprintf(“%x”, $i)”, and one system call (“ifconfig eth0 inet6 add”) and I know a few more things: 1) Somewhere around IP number 4,010 I ran into a limit in Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4’s networking subsystems, or in VMware ESX Server. No more data in or out on any protocol. Smells like a buffer size needs to grow. I expected this. 2) The …

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Only Keep What We Need

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Human beings tend to hoard things. There are various explanations for it, usually evolutionary. Wealth and possessions tend to be the first things we think of as “hoardable” but on a daily basis I interact with people who hoard data. In some places it seems to be an epidemic, a disease among IT departments and management, where folks try to collect, index, and retain gobs of data. I ask them “why do you need all this data?” and they reply with vague, ambiguous missives. They cannot even fathom not keeping track of absolutely everything. “You can never have too much data,” one fellow told me a few years ago. “You use the data when making decisions!” he uttered as if …

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SftpDrive Rules

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I support a number of developers. These developers all have Windows desktops, but need to edit their code which resides on UNIX hosts (AIX, Solaris, and Linux). I love Samba, but not if it’s installed on 300 UNIX hosts. It’s another software package that needs to be configured, firewalled, monitored, patched, and maintained. The permission model for Samba is somewhat orthogonal to the permission model for UNIX hosts, too, so my tools for handling user accounts won’t work. My developers want to edit their code with local GUI text editors. Getting them to use X11, or even text editors via SecureCRT is not a good solution, mainly because they resist. I’m cool with that. I know what tools I’m most …

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Something Is Fishy

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“I see they’ve got you doing everything around here now.” I was opening the janitor’s closet outside of my office. They have a nice sink in there that makes cleaning our fish tanks easier. My friend Eric was walking past as I was unpacking the closet. “Yeah. I guess I shouldn’t have been a smartass to my boss,” I said with a grin. “But seriously, why are you in the janitor’s closet?” “It makes maintaining the fish tank easier.” “Oooh, you guys have a fish tank?” “Yeah, come here and take a look.” Our cube farm has two tanks. One is in the middle, just as you walk in the door. It’s 55 gallons and has orange platys, green tiger …

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