System Administration

System Administration/DevOps/Cloud and Developer Positions Open @ UW – Madison

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If you’ve ever thought about working with the people & organization who basically eliminated rickets by discovering how to boost and synthesize vitamin D, who took a bunch of spoiled sweet clover hay and turned it into the most popular blood thinner ever (and the most popular rat poison ever, ha!), or who isolated human embryonic stem cells so that research could happen without destroying embryos in the process, here’s your chance. The Morgridge Institute for Research on the University of Wisconsin – Madison campus is looking to hire: two build & test workflow system developers, one database developer, one software security specialist, and two system administrators, among some other positions, as part of the Software Assurance Marketplace, or SWAMP. …

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Hey Readers, Please Vote For Me

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The inimitable Eric Siebert has the voting open for the 2013 Top VMware/Virtualization Blogs. Last year I was pleasantly surprised to find myself voted into the top 50 virtualization bloggers, at #31. Voting closes soon so you should go over there right now and vote, for me and all the other people who put so much time into writing throughout the year. It’s one of the few ways you can show appreciation for all the work people put into blogging. All that information is worth a minute of your time, right? Besides, I want to hit #30 this year! 🙂 J And, as always, thank you all for reading, commenting, and introducing yourselves to me at conferences. I wouldn’t do this …

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Error While Loading Shared Libraries, Cannot Open Shared Object File

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In the “I wish the Internet had an actual correct answer” category comes a question from a Windows colleague trying to build software on Linux. He asks “I’m trying to do some web performance testing and I compiled weighttp and the libev libraries, which worked fine, but when I try to run the program it gives me the following error.” weighttp: error while loading shared libraries: libev.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory “I checked /usr/local/lib and the files are there. Do you have a suggestion?” Ah yes, a classic problem when building software. The problem here is that libev installed itself into /usr/local/lib: $ ls -l /usr/local/lib/libev* -rw-r–r–. 1 root root 435770 Feb 22 15:20 …

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"Because awesome things sometimes look a lot less awesome from the inside"

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Alasdair Allen hits it right on the head: We’ve built a culture where it’s hard to acknowledge that you don’t know something, because knowing things is intricately linked with the doing of awesome things — which in turn is linked to our stature with our peers. Something I’ve noted, talked about, and tried to work on for years: being able to say “I don’t know.” I work with some folks that just cannot say those words. There’s stuff you know you know, there’s stuff you know you don’t know, and there’s stuff you don’t know you don’t know. The last category is dangerous. The last category is where people who always have an answer, right or wrong, put you and …

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"A Stronger Team, Not a Weaker You"

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Greg Ferro has Ethan Banks’ “Five Things About Mentoring” in in his link post today, from which I’ve stolen the title of my post (sorry Ethan, too good to pass up).  Mentoring is a big part of being a successful system administrator, and Ethan is dead-on in his points. Go read it quick because I’m going to comment: “Not everybody wants to be mentored” — time management & prioritization of tasks are probably the biggest things IT staff should work on. Properly identifying a coworker as a waste of time seems harsh, but you’ve got better things to do. I suggest heavy automation as an appropriate answer to a coworker that has given up. A script can learn new things. …

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Explaining Things Simply

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Humans try to make everything really, really complicated. Sometimes we need the complexity but we often do it just because we can. We do it without thinking about it, perhaps a subliminal way of telling people to check out our species’ big brains. It’s also the way we write. We write long and complicated emails, memos, documents, blog posts, whatever. We use big words when we could very easily use smaller ones. Think about all the times you’ve used the word “utilize.” You don’t need that word, ever. Another word you never need is “bespoke.” People who use those kinds of words are writing so that nobody will read or understand them, which is a complete waste of time for …

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Changing sshd Port Numbers Continues To Be A Bad Idea

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If you were a fan of my post last month that was basically arguing that you shouldn’t change sshd’s default port  there’s another great post on the topic by Tom Ryder over at his blog, Arabesque. He has a couple points that I didn’t have. You should read his stuff. If you’re not a fan of our point of view you now have another comment section where you can argue the virtues of security through obscurity.

Everything is Covered in Everything

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Quick Public Service Announcement: I’ve noted a resurgence of “OMG POOP SMARTPHONE” stories lately (there was a streak of them a while ago, too), and I’d just like to point out some other things that have bacteria on or in them: Everything on Earth. This becomes pretty clear if you are, or involved with, someone who is pregnant, as pregnancy’s effect on the immune system makes people temporarily suceptible to listeriosis (among most other things). What is listeriosis? It’s an infection caused by Listeria bacteria. Where does Listeria live? ON ABSOLUTELY ALL OF YOUR UNCOOKED FOOD.[0] Nasty? Perhaps. But I liken this to the junior sysadmin that first types “free” at a UNIX shell prompt, and discovers, OMG OMG, that …

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Three Reasons Why Hatred of the Windows 8 UI is a Good Thing

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There seems to be a lot of negative sentiment about the Windows 8 user interface (the interface formerly known as Metro). It might be counterintuitive but I think this is ultimately a good thing. First, mainstream OS user interfaces have stagnated, and I like that Microsoft is thinking about what the next steps might be. I also like that they’re thinking about it in a different way than other OS vendors, especially not emulating Mac OS’ ridiculous skeuomorphism. Trying to maintain some common interface elements between desktops, laptops, and mobile devices seems like a good idea, too. They’re obviously not done thinking about the problem, otherwise they wouldn’t have left the desktop in Windows 8. That’s the main problem people …

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Impressions of Windows 8

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I’ve spent about 20 hours now with Microsoft Windows 8 release running in VMware Workstation 9. I’d looked at the developer preview months ago but not exercised it very much, figuring things would change. Some things did, for the better, but the UI changes, by far the most controversial, stayed pretty much the same. Windows 7 was called the successor to the wildly popular Windows XP but in my mind Windows 8 only succeeds the star-crossed Vista. It’s really too bad that all the seriously cool things — the new task manager, Storage Spaces, all the personalization updates, File History, the task bar improvements, several billion other tweaks — are all being overshadowed by the interface. Desktop PCs are not tablets. …

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