Some of my coworkers believe that accounts should never be deleted, just locked. Some of my coworkers believe that accounts should always be deleted. I like a combination of the two. First, lock the account. This should tell you if there are programs running as the user, crontab entries, etc. After a few weeks remove the account. If the account is gone there is no chance it’ll get unlocked somehow, get hacked, send spam, conflict with another UID, or make your life difficult in the future.

Hey web, I am doing a Nagios deployment. I need to decide on hardware, but I can’t. In short, do I run Nagios on a Sun T2000 or a Dell PowerEdge 2950? It’d be Nagios 2.9, with about 30,000 services monitored (500 hosts * 60 service checks). The T2000 would be something like eight 1 GHz cores (32 “CoolThreads”), 8 GB RAM, etc. with Solaris 10. The 2950 would be something like dual quad-core Intel X5355s, 8 GB RAM, etc. with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Is there anybody out there that has anything to  say either way about this? The only information I can find about Nagios on a T2000 is an old white paper about OpsWare, and they …

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It seems like everybody has their own idea of the best way to name computers. Some people like functional names, like HQPRINT01 or MSP-SALES. Some people like unique names, like LARRY, VOLTRON, or STRONGBAD. I like to mix the two, with each host getting a unique name plus any “service” names it might need for customer interaction. That way if I repurpose a machine, or add a service, I can just give it a new service name. Likewise, if I move a service I can move the DNS entry for the service without having to reconfigure every client. Regardless of what you like individually a sysadmin team should have a clear policy about naming things, so names are uniform. RFC …

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