Perl

Use Microsoft Excel For Your Text Manipulation Needs

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I’m just going to lay it out there: sysadmins should use Microsoft Excel more. I probably will be labeled a traitor and a heathen for this post. It’s okay, I have years of practice having blasphemous opinions on various IT religious beliefs. Do I know how to use the UNIX text tools like sed, awk, xargs, find, cut, and so on? Yes. Do I know how to use regular expressions? Yes. Do I know how to use Perl and Python to manipulate text, and do poor-man’s extract-transform-load sorts of things? Absolutely. It’s just that I rarely need such complicated tools in my daily work. I often just have a short list of something that I need to turn into a bunch of …

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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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Tags in VMware vSphere 5.1

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Mike Preston has a short post & video about the tag features in VMware vSphere 5.1: Just think, say you have hundreds, or thousands of VMs.  You can now more align the way you categorize things inside of your business within vCenter, and sort/search on those custom tags. From the moment I saw the tag features I’ve been pretty optimistic about them. They’d be useful for tagging VMs with all sorts of information, like billing, locations, tiering, or even as a makeshift CMDB by tagging admins, applications, etc. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they were eventually used to drive features like various storage and network profiles, replication, etc. Just set the right tag and everything just takes care of …

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Should You Install Development Tools on Production Hosts?

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Every once in a while I get sucked back into the age-old system administrator religious argument: should you install development tools on a production host? There are basically two schools of thought: Yes, if you need them. Despite the production nature of the host there are times where you might want to build software, perhaps something like the VMware Tools kernel modules on a Linux server, and having them helps a lot. They don’t take up much space and it’s nice to keep all your hosts identical. No, absolutely not. “Development” tools should only be on hosts that are for “development.” Build a software lifecycle management system to move everything from development to test to production. The presence of compilers …

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Upcoming Virtualization & Sysadmin Events in Wisconsin

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There are a number of virtualization & sysadmin events coming up in Wisconsin in the next two months. Here are the ones that I know of, if you know of more please comment and I’ll add them. Madison’s first ever #vBeers is Thursday, April 26, 2012 at the UW-Madison Memorial Union. I’m putting it together, if you’re in the area please stop by. It’s supposed to be in the upper 50° F range outside so we’ll probably be inside in the Rathskeller. No signup needed. Please come and keep me company. Stephen Foskett is setting up Milwaukee’s first #vBeers for May 1, 2012, at the Miller Time Pub, 7 to 10 PM. You can sign up via Eventbrite. So far …

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