System Administration

The last time I looked at either OpenOffice or StarOffice they weren’t impressive. Microsoft Office has been my standard for a long time, but with the release of the first beta of MS Office 12 I’ve decided to see where these other office suites are in comparison, to help me answer the question “should I upgrade to MS Office 12 when it comes out?.” I do a lot of writing in Word, mostly because it’s easy to spell check things, and I use Excel as a lazy way to do some basic text manipulation. As of right now I’ve installed OpenOffice 2.0.1 on all three of my PCs. My plan is to use OpenOffice for two weeks, then use StarOffice …

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Standardization isn’t a task. It is a mindset, a very long-running process. Standardization isn’t staying the course. It’s adjusting the course to stay standard. Standardization isn’t a manager’s orders. It is a grass-roots effort. Standardization isn’t one month. It’s two years. Standardization isn’t a fad. It is a religion. Standardization isn’t manual labor. It is repeated, evolving, simple automation. Standardization isn’t overreacting, or mountains from molehills. It is fire and motion. Standardization isn’t some herculean effort undertaken periodically by organizations. It’s something to be done every minute, with every task. Standardization isn’t “how do we make this server look like the rest?” It is “can we make all the other servers look like this one?” Standardization isn’t a procedure. It …

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I was just reading the notes on day one of OSBC over at RedMonk, and the idea of a perpetual beta sorta annoyed me: Perpetual Beta: as popularized by Google, this is the notion that software is a process rather than an end state. But the key insight here was that the customer appetite for this dynamic evolution – which Adam Bosworth might term intelligent reaction – is likely to be proportional to the business importance of that application. In other words, Google News can afford to experiment in ways that Google Search probably cannot. I’d never thought about it in quite those terms, but it’s a good point. Then I read through the Wikipedia article on release stages. My …

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I really feel like I’m pulling explanations out of my ass lately. You know what I mean? It’s like I’m inventing a damn Rube Goldberg machine in my head to explain the weird stuff at work. “Hey Bob, the patches that you applied last week to our machine are causing serious I/O problems. We need them off of there ASAP.” “Really? We’re running those same things on identical machines, and all manner of different machines, and all of those work really well.” “Huh. Things are really messed up. What are you going to do?” “I’ll get one of my guys to look at it. Hang on.” “We really need those patches reverted.” “Yeah. Let me make sure it’s the patches …

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Stop patching your machines. Seriously. You know, patching is overrated. IBM releases an urgent security alert for their OS, and you can just ignore it. They don’t know shit. Red Hat releases a security update, saying that you need to apply it. Screw them, they’re morons. And Solaris would never have a security hole, so why would you need to patch it? If you want to seem like you’re doing something, like, say, if an auditor is hanging around, subscribe them to the Red Hat Network. It’ll look good, and then you can watch as the number of errata for your systems climbs into the hundreds. And managers, the single best way to impress me as a tech is to …

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Update: I have posted a newer version of this article. So I just spent about 10 hours of my life getting IPMI working on some Dell PowerEdge 1850s and 2800s so I can cycle their power over the network, and turn them on if the power goes out. That was a lot more challenging than I thought it’d be, mostly because there are about zero good places for someone who generally knows what they’re doing to get an idea of where to start. So here’s my slightly-convoluted guide to configuring IPMI on eighth-generation Dell PowerEdge servers, with emphasis on Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 4. This will probably work for Dell PowerEdge 1650s, 2650s, and 1750s, too, but they don’t …

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Okay, so the blog has been suffering a little. Sorry folks. I’ve just been burnt out. My primary job has been hectic lately, as management reorganized quite a large chunk of the system administration and “base technologist” jobs a month ago. I’m not complaining at all, actually, even though the last two weeks have been 70 hour weeks. I know I’m not going to get any sympathy when I say that I really try to keep to 40 hours a week (hey, work smarter not harder). Sometimes a reorg can be a good thing, if you are able to get some things fixed in the process. One thing that is really getting fixed are some of the operating system teams. …

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While I was gone last Friday one of my Linux boxes was DDoS’ed. I’m not sure that the proper response was “oh, cool!” though. Heh, I’ve had nearly every continent scan and attack me but never any DDoS lovin’, and that’s fairly exciting to me. I’m actually a bit annoyed that I missed it. It was all small UDP packets hitting all possible ports, beginning *exactly* at 01:00 CDT and ending *exactly* at 09:00 CDT. Props to the DDoS’ers — they’ve mastered cron. 🙂 My network colleagues tell me it hit 300,000 flows per hour. Interestingly enough, the Linux box — a single-CPU Dell PowerEdge 2650 running Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3 — didn’t seem to notice much, beyond …

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