Why are Solaris admins angry?

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I think I understand why Solaris system administrators are angry at the world. Their operating system sucks. I have been watching a colleague of mine who is an excellent Linux and Windows administrator learn the workings of Solaris, and he’s been describing some of it to me. I helped him set up Solaris x86 version 10 on a SunFire v20z yesterday, and my god did that suck. The installation took an hour, mostly because the machine sat there trying to detect things that it was ultimately going to ask us about later anyhow, and then it took forever to copy the data from the DVD to the hard disk. How does an OS still not have logical volume management built …

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iPod nano Cures Colds

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So this morning I discovered I have a cold. I hate colds. I don’t know what is up, but this is the third cold in as many months. I hate taking cold medicine, mostly because it makes me feel even worse than the cold itself. Taking a drug to ease an infection just seems like it’s making my body work twice as hard, once for the cold and once to get rid of the drugs. So for now I remain mucus boy, double-fisting huge glasses of water. Ugh. I just hope I didn’t give it to anybody I was with this weekend. The bad feelings of a cold are far outweighed by the knowledge that someone else is ill because …

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Vilhjalmur Stefanson

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I first heard this one uttered by Jon Krakauer on Nova’s Mountain of Ice “Adventure is a sign of incompetence.” – Vilhjalmur Stefanson

Stop Patching your OS

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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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What Blogs Do I Read?

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Phil over at Haacked started this — what are ten blogs you enjoyed reading recently? A timely question, since a friend of mine was just astonished that I read blogs and asked for some recommendations (I haven’t told him I post on one yet — I’m waiting for him to find it sometime on his own). For me it’s been: Vinography – Alder over at Vinography has some excellent, down-to-earth commentary on wine, with some reviews, some advice. I drink the occassional bottle of wine and love cigars, so his commentary is well received by me. Which also makes me wonder why I haven’t found any cigar blogs yet (haven’t been looking, really). Fermentations – Tom Wark is a wine …

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Themes

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Arggh, all themes for WordPress suck. I’d like one with the sidebar on the left side, and as much space as possible for text on the right. If you’re viewing this site I’m going to have to apologize for the way it’s going to look for the next day or so. I’m on it. If you’re reading this via RSS, well, you are safe, for now. 🙂

Configuring and Securing IPMI on Dell PowerEdge x8xx Hardware

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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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Crapahildis

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William Gibson has a wonderful entry on his blog from the other day, regarding old Dutch names like Crapahildis. It is no wonder why names like that, and Hortense, etc. have died out. My god. It’s strange, though, that I feel a machine naming scheme coming on…

Reorganization to Add Vision

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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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Back

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Ah, New York City is a wonderful place. But it’s good to be home now, too. More later, when I get a chance to sort through all my email.

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