sysadmin

System Administrator Appreciation Day is One Week Away

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I have to thank the SolarWinds crew for reminding me that we, as system administrators, have a holiday coming up. And in particular, bosses, managers, and other herders of nerds should be aware that July 29th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Yes, sysadmins. You know, those folks that tirelessly respond to pages at midnight. Those folks that come running when your CEO’s laptop has a virus on it. Those folks that virtualized all your servers and saved you lots of money. The folks that run your servers, and networks, and keep things in your data center calm and cool have a thankless job 364.25 days out of the year. Next Friday is a good excuse to thank them. Every sysadmin …

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UNIX Utility of the Day: watch

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Not a lot of people know about the ‘watch’ command, part of the standard complement of GNU tools available on most Linux distributions, as well as many Linux-like OSes such as VMware ESX and the VMware vMA. Simply put, it runs a command at a specific interval for you. So if you want to continually see the number of httpd processes running on a host you could use: watch ‘ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l” Or maybe you want to watch the temperature on a remote physical host using IPMI. The -n flag changes the number of seconds between the commands: watch -n 60 -d ‘ipmitool -I lan -U username -P password -H host-bmc.address sdr type “Temperature”‘ The …

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Labels Should Not Be Affixed To Removable Parts

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Once upon a time, in a data center not far away, a lone system administrator took the front bezels off several identical machines. Upon completing the work, this individual discovered that the labels for those machines were on the bezels themselves, making it difficult to tell which machines the bezels belonged to. Shortly thereafter, this lone system administrator configured the front display of those particular Dell servers to display the machine name, thereby solving this problem for himself and retaining the use of the bezels, because they’re pretty. Once upon a longer time ago, in a data center slightly farther away, a lone system administrator added a network interface card to one of his hosts. In doing this he removed …

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8 Hints For Using DNS More Effectively

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“We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection.” – Butler Lampson 1. DNS is a hierarchy. Use it to show logical groupings. Fully-qualified domain names (FQDNs) like pussinbootsthemovie.com are great examples of what happens when you don’t take advantage of the hierarchy in DNS. Wouldn’t pussinboots.dreamworks.com be just as easy? Or, frankly, just avoid the issue and do what Disney does: http://disney.com/cars/. What if all your company’s desktops were in .desktop.company.com? Would that help assign permissions to them? Or your engineering group had all their stuff in .eng.company.com? Test hosts in .test.company.com? Would having all your services at your DR site in .dr.company.com help to manage, monitor, and use them? I’m not saying that any of …

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