Archive for December, 2008

I posted about Tom Limoncelli and his Time Management for System Administrators. I have written a simple wrapper to do pre and post processing of a todo file as it is opened and closed to somewhat mirror “the cycle”. If your interested you can find a bit more information on todo-cycle here.

It’s not new news but I havent seen anyone else mention it. Ben Rockwood over at cuddletech had his second SA Pro podcast with Tom Limoncelli, it covers time management. It’s a good listen, I’m still waiting for him to setup a feed for the podcasts. Tom has some good advice, I have picked up a few things and read his Time Management for System Administrators since listening to the podcast. At any rate check out the podcast http://cuddletech.com/sapro/.

Im sure everyone is familiar with smb messages especially as everyone was assulted with them about 10 years ago (stupid soho routers and spammers unite!). Anyway, there are clients for linux like Linpopup. Well recently I didn’t want to use one of those to be able to send messages to my linux workstations so I cobbled together a simple network popup app with python. (more…)

I just wanted to make sure no one forgets that wildcards can be used in your .ssh/config. This can be extremely helpful. For example say you have 100 nodes that have a simple nameing scheme of nodexxxx. You can add the following into your ssh config and pre-poplulate settings.

Host node*
    User staffuser
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/staff_key

That would cause any ssh connection matching node* to use the user staffuser and .ssh/staff_key as the ssh key. By the same token you could do this.

Host *.locallan.domin.com
    User me

This could be useful if you have networks of machines that hook into different authentication systems. Nothing groundbreaking by any means but its useful so dont forget about it.

With small websites sometimes you need to put up a maintenance page while you are making some modifications. Typically you should have some staging enviornment but sometimes infrastructure does not allow for this. If you find your self in this situation you might like this tip. (more…)