System Administration

How to Install CrashPlan on Linux

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I like CrashPlan. They support a wider range of operating systems than some of their competitors, they have a simple pricing model, unlimited storage & retention, and a nice local, mobile, and web interfaces. I’ve been a customer for a few years now, and recently have switched a few of my clients’ businesses over to them, too. What I don’t like is that they don’t seem to support Linux very well, which is typical of companies when their installed base is mostly Windows & Mac. Most notably, their install instructions are sparse and they don’t tell you what packages you need to have installed, which is important because cloud VMs and whatnot are usually “minimal” installations. I’ve attempted to open …

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Why Use SD Cards For VMware ESXi?

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I’ve had four interactions now regarding my post on replacing a failed SD card in one of my servers. They’ve ranged from inquisitive: @plankers why would you use an SD card in a server. I’m not a sys admin, but just curious. — Allan Çelik (@Allan_Celik) January 22, 2015 to downright rude: “SD cards are NOT reliable and you are putting youre [sic^2] infrastructure at risk. Id [sic] think a person like you would know to use autodeploy.” Aside from that fellow’s malfunctioning apostrophe, he has a good, if blunt, point. SD cards aren’t all that reliable, and there are other technologies to get a hypervisor like ESXi on a host. So why use SD cards? 1. Cost. Looking at …

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How to Replace an SD Card in a Dell PowerEdge Server

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We use the Dell Internal Dual SD module (IDSDM) for our VMware ESXi hosts. It works great, and saves us a bunch of money per server in that we don’t need RAID controllers, spinning disks, etc. Ours are populated with two 2 GB SD cards from the factory, and set to Mirror Mode in the BIOS. The other day we received an alarm: Failure detected on Internal Dual SD Module SD2 We’d never seen a failure like this so we had no idea how to fix it, and the Internet was only slightly helpful (hence the point of this writeup). Here’s what we did to replace it. Note: I’m certified to work on Dell servers, and have been messing with …

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Minimum Vacation

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Sysadmin1138 has a post today on minimum vacation policies, an interesting twist on the unlimited vacation policies many startups now have: The idea seems to be a melding of the best parts of unlimited and max. Employees are required to take a certain number of days off a year, and those days have to be full-disconnect days in which no checking in on work is done. Instead of using scarcity to urge people to take real vacations, it explicitly states you will take these days and you will not do any work on them. Sysadmin1138 expounds on several ways this is a cool idea. I agree. There are real benefits to forcing employees to go (and stay) completely away for …

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Keeping My Blade Options Open

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One of the types of advice I really appreciate is that which helps me to keep my options open. I have a team from Dell in the office this week, configuring a giant pile of equipment we bought. The equipment includes a bunch of blade servers. We’ve relied on rack-mount equipment for decades, but with a push towards a private cloud we opted to jump into the early 21st century with blades. I’ve had relatively little experience with blades so it’s nice to have more experienced people around. When I’m designing a system I always try to figure out what it’ll need to look like four years from now. Seeing the future is the hardest part of designing a system. …

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The Right Way, The Wrong Way, and The Way It Is

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I hate purists. You know the type. They’re in all IT shops, in all projects. They’re the people who won’t do any work unless they know exactly how it’ll all look in the end. They research, endlessly. They’re pedantic. They sit and poke holes in your work, claiming that they’re just playing Devil’s advocate. They rarely start an answer with “it depends,” opting instead for condescending phrases like “if I were you” or “if it were up to me.” And they wouldn’t know a minimum viable product if it bit them in the duff. Nobody knows how a project or product is going to look in the end. And even if you do have a great vision, nobody really knows the …

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The Eternal Wait For Vendor Software Updates

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There’s been a fair amount of commentary & impatience from IT staff as we wait for vendors to patch their products for the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability. Why don’t they hurry up? They’ve had 10 days now, what’s taking so long? How big of a deal is it to change a few libraries? Perhaps, to understand this, we need to consider how software development works. The Software Development Life Cycle To understand why vendors take a while to do their thing we need to understand how they work. In short, there are a few different phases they work through when designing a new system or responding to bug reports. Requirement Analysis is where someone figures out precisely what the customer wants …

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8 Practical Notes about Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160)

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I see a lot of misinformation floating around about the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug. In case you’ve been living under a rock, OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 through 1.0.1f are vulnerable to a condition where a particular feature will leak the contents of memory. This is bad, because memory often contains things like the private half of public-key cryptographic exchanges (which should always stay private), protected information, parts of your email, instant messenger conversations, and other information such as logins and passwords for things like web applications. This problem is bad, but freaking out about it, and talking out of our duffs about it, adds to the problem. You can test if you’re vulnerable with http://filippo.io/Heartbleed/ — just specify a host and a port, or …

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Upgrading to VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 from Windows vCenter 5.1

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My coworkers and I recently undertook the task of upgrading our vSphere 5.1 environment to version 5.5. While upgrades of these nature aren’t really newsworthy we did something of increasing interest in the VMware world: switched from the Windows-based vCenter Server on a physical host to the vCenter Server Appliance, or vCSA, which is a VM. This is the story of that process. If you aren’t familiar with the vCSA it is a vCenter implementation delivered as a SuSE-based appliance from VMware. It has been around for several major versions, but until vSphere 5.5 it didn’t have both feature parity with Windows and the ability to support very many hosts & VMs without connecting to an external database. Under vSphere …

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What Clients Don't Know (and Why It's Your Fault)

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“Whether you work with outside clients or whether you’re part of an internal team your job is always, always going to include having to convince someone of something. Because your job isn’t just making things. Believe it or not, that’s the easy part. You’re going to spend 90% of your time convincing people that shit you thought up in the shower this morning is right. Your job is to figure out whether something should be made, how it’s made, and always, always, always work to convince someone that you’ve made the right choices.” That’s a quote from Mike Monteiro’s presentation at the Event Apart Austin 2013 conference, a presentation that seems suited to system administrators, IT consultants, and IT professionals …

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