I was recently asked how I became a Systems Administrator. I answered with the normal story of my life and moved on. However, it got me thinking about what has actually led me to where I am. A colleague of mine had recently mentioned how people love top x lists and best x lists so I sat down and came up with my list of top 10 traits of a Systems Administrator. Continue reading
I mentioned in my last post Shared console sessions that I would have an update to get near same functionality without setuid of the screen binary. Well here it is. Hopefully you are aware of expect and how it can be used to automate interactive programs like telnet. Expect is has many more uses that people are exploiting. Enter kibitz. Continue reading
It’s not that I can not read 24 hour time, it’s just a pain to deal with on a daily basis. I was raised with 12 hr, and its just quicker for me to read. So if you are running KDE4 and you would prefer 12 hour format in your panel read on. Continue reading
Working with virtual machines after having worked with physical machines can be a wonderful experience. Wonderful that is until the bios scree blows past you several times. Continue reading
I needed to install cpanel inside of one of my Centos 5.1 domU. The centos install was bootstrapped by the default rinse configuration (see xen-tools with my patch that you can see from a previous post). If you follow the install docs you will have tried to uninstall openldap etc …. Continue reading
Bonnie is a great tool to use to benchmark your file system. Just a quick tip on using bonnie. Continue reading
Recently I ordered a server with Debian etch. Unfortunately during testing I noticed that startx was on the system, along with a whole slew of other junk that I don’t generally want on a fresh server. I wanted to remove all of the cruft but I didn’t have the exact package list. Continue reading
Im not a big fan of cpanel but I do manage a server that runs it. Recently some update was pushed down that caused about 50% of my users to not be able to access mail. It all boiled down to a permission issue that the cpanel scripts /scripts/mailperm did not take care of. Their scripts do not correct the permissions of the virtual user maildirs. Continue reading
If you use multiwan with pfsense and like me you have issues making outbound ftp connections try disabling the userland FTP-Proxy application on the LAN interface. It may stop you from being able to do active ftp connections but at least you can use ftp. With it enabled I was unable to make any outbound ftp connections active or passive.
Ok I hate printers. If anyone has an aged dell 1700 series printer that prints out pages that say to replace the imaging drum over and over (even after replacing it) then you will like this tip. Continue reading