Sysadmin1138 Expounds

Smartphone ecosystems have definitely reached the level of complexity where we have to worry about hostile apps. And they're following the pattern shown by the Internet over the years in that there are classes of hostile actions: Known/Allowed, also known...

Way back when I first got into Group Policies, which was just after Group Policies were released, one of the things we mooted about the BoF den was a simple thing we could do to tell users that they were...

A, "dude, that's a cool idea," wave has passed through the technology sector in the wake of an article about a minimum vacation policy. This was billed as an evolution of the Unlimited Vacation Policy that is standard at startups...

Humans are curious critters. We keep trying to pick apart reality to figure out how it works. Part of that is to break reality up into smaller chunks so it makes sense. Abstractions improve understanding and allow further refinements to...

This is what busy looks like. I had an interesting puppet thing happen that I wanted to write about, but I couldn't grab the needed log-file in time. Dammit. It was about an odd message that shows up in user...

An essay has been making the rounds about how much you (developer type person) are worth for hourly-rate. It is breath-taking in its honesty. This person sets out a pay-rate scale based strictly on public-access reputation markets and evidence of...

No, I'm talking about that fancy wristband some of you wear, the one that talks to a smartphone. That's a monitoring system, but for your body. We're IT. We do monitoring systems, so lets take a look at this one!...

I went on a bit of a twitter rant recently. @SysAdm1138 What if you're the employee on the other side of the desk? There's only so many times you can ask for a decision... -- Kevin Elliott (@KevinCElliott) October 20,...

If you're wondering why comments aren't working, as I was, and are on shared hosting, as I am, and get to looking at your error_log file and see something like this in it: [Sun Oct 12 12:34:56 2014] [error] [client...

"Over the next few decades demand in the top layer of the labor market may well centre on individuals with high abstract reasoning, creative, and interpersonal skills that are beyond most workers, including graduates."-Economist, vol413/num8907, Oct 4, 2014, "Special...

Sysadmin-types, we kind of have to have a phone. It's what the monitoring system makes vibrate when our attention is needed, and we also tend to be "always on-call", even if it's tier 4 emergency last resort on-call. But sometimes...

There is something that not many people seem to realize about how your personal email can get sucked into a lawsuit filed against your company. It all comes down to ediscovery......

When it comes to things to send alarming emails about, CPU, RAM, Swap, and Disk are the four everyone thinks of. If something seems slow, check one or all of those four to see if it really is slow. This...

Strange as it might be to contemplate, but imagine what would happen if AWS went into receivership and was shut down to liquidate assets? What would that mean for your infrastructure? Project? Or even startup? It would be pretty bad....

4100 emails. That's the approximate number of alert emails that got auto-deleted while I was away on vacation. That number will rise further before I officially come back from vacation, but it's still a big number. The sad part is,...

I read yet another article on bias in in-person interviews lately. This comes as no surprise, bias is incredibly hard to overcome in hiring processes which is why US Civil Service hiring procedures look so arcane. The money-quote is this...

For some, every tweet is sacred. Each and every one is to be read, and caught up on if they've been away. For some it's a stream of interesting, to be looked in upon when the whim strikes. There may...

I came out as genderqueer 11 months ago. I started a new job 6 months ago. I haven't talked about it much, but I put in a lot of angst over how I'd present at interviews while I was between...

When automating a business process, be it figuring out when user meta-data needs to be eliminated or how to set up a certain type of server, there are certain orders of complexity you face: Do THAT. If THIS then DO...

Over the years I've seen a small collection of fake-names crop up in the sysadmin space. Here is a list: BOFHAn oldie, but a Sysadmin who has gone over to the dark-side. FredOriginally coined by Laura Chappell, Fred is the...

I did this at a previous job, so here are a few tips for what will make it easier on everyone. Plan at least 4, preferably 6, weeks out. This gives your watch-standers the chance to arrange their lives around...

Having watched recent events unfold, I'm beginning to wonder what effect employment contracts are having on how companies and their employees respond to catastrophic reputation-loss events. A certain well known open-source company is undergoing this right now, which is why...

The number one piece of password advice is: Only memorize a single complex password, use a password manager for everything else. Gone is the time when you can plan on memorizing complex strings of characters using shift keys, letter substitution...

Joseph Kern posted this gem to Twitter yesterday. It's one of those things I never thought about since I kind of instinctively learned what it is, but I'm sure there are those out there who don't know the difference between...

While the push for IPv6 at the Internet edge is definitely there, the push for internal adoption is not nearly as strong. In the absence of a screaming crisis or upper-management commands to push things along, it is human-factors that...

A bit off topic, but it's been on my mind lately. XX and XY are not the sex-absolutes you may think it is. They're the two most common bins, but they're far from the only genetic bins that humans end...

Systems Administrators have a reputation, a bad one, when it comes to personal skills. I saw it at WWU when problems went unreported because users were afraid we'd yell at them for being stupid. I see it every time someone...

A friend of mine recently posted some job stuff and he had a good observation: I investigate businesses that pay employees under the table. I ensure that unemployment insurance is paid by the employers, protecting the employees and ensuring they...

It all began with a bit of Twitter snark: Utilities follow a progression. They begin as a small shell script that does exactly what I need it to do in this one instance. Then someone else wants to use it,...

Worried about the IPv4 to IPv6 migration? NetWare users had a similar migration when Novell finally got off of IPX and moved to native TCP/IP with the release of NetWare 5.0 on or around 1999. We've done it before. Like...

This is a bit of a rehash of a post I did back in 2005, but Novell did it right when it came to handling user credentials way back in the late 80's and early 90's. The original documents have...

Novell introduced NDS with NetWare 4.0 in 1993, and is still being shipped 21years later as part of Open Enterprise Server. For those of you who've never run into it, NDS (Novell Directory Services, currently marketed as eDirectory) is currently...

As I've recently been through a change of jobs I've had a lot of chance to look back on my career. That career is long enough to have included Novell NetWare in it quite prominently, though I no longer point...

10 years ago today, I had my first post. This was done as part of the first big project I was given when I started working for WWU: figure out how to serve web-pages from home directories. Which I did,...

My fellow technologists are some of the most rabid anti-union people I know. However, I believe there is a kind of union that we can actually benefit from. Read on. By far the biggest complaint I hear against unions is...

Scenario: You're on-call and have the on-call phone. Tonight you're going to a Thing that requires formal dress, and that means... a dress. Which in turn means no pockets, and therefore you'll need to set the on-call phone to an...

On-call? Don't want the person sharing your bedroom to wake up when you get paged? There's a widget for that. If you're a deep sleeper and share a bed with a light-sleeper, this just might be the thing you need...

On reflection "tech company" here is really, "tech company big enough to have a large corporate head-quarters". The startup I just left had: No cafeteria, but we did have a kitchen that we shared our meals at when we...

As I look around the industry with an eye towards further employment, I've noticed a difference of philosophy between startups and the more established players. One easy way to see this difference is on their job postings. If it says...

Being in the middle of a job hunt means pondering personal presentation as it relates to interviews. Get the suit out of the closet, make sure it's clean, figure out where the ties went, that whole thing. I've been working...

Bob: I hear you're on the job market now. What can you tell us about that? Sysadmin1138: Well Bob, not a whole lot. It wasn't voluntary. Sad to hear that. How are you holding up? Pretty solid. Financial planning is...

My time at Logik has come to a close. Their latest product, Logikcull, really is hot stuff when it comes to eDiscovery in the SaaS space, and I've enjoyed working on it. It's a very interesting distributed processing problem and...

One of the talks here at LISA13 was one about a new Cloud-optimized operating system called OSv. This is a new thing, and I hadn't heard of it before. Why do we need yet another OS? And one that doesn't...

I'm at LISA13 right now and I have a couple of blog posts percolating, but this one I can do right now. I went to the two Women in Advanced Computing events here and as usual they covered things allies...

Anyone taking DevOps to heart should read about Normal Accidents. The book is about failure modes of nuclear power plants; those highly automated and extremely instrumented things that they are still manage to fail in spite of everything that we...

[As it is National Coming Out Day, I point out I did that here] If you're a systems administrator, you've taken surveys. It seems any vendor with a support contract will send you one after you interact with support in...

A rare post in which I talk about my day-job. We're doing a few things that are either really freaking cool or head-scratchy depending on your point of view. We've kicked a Software-as-a-Service product out the door that's aimed at...

The NSA Raccoon is mostly right in this one: For two reasons. Reason 1: You (probably) don't own your phone If you haven't rooted your phone, you don't really own it. While Apple says the fingerprint images are not uploaded...

There are reasons. Inertia. I've always had one, so the habit is there. Totally free conference calling. When parents call, just pick up the extension. No need to burn double minutes, no mucking around with speaker-phone. Great! It gives us...

Like many sysadmins I learned to type on an IBM Model M keyboard. That was a mechanical switch keyboard and any time you made a key-press there was a click sound. It was also made to engineering standards unheard of...