I don’t like writing posts with a low useful content quotient, but here goes.

After having only one new (i.e. not used) phone in eight years - and the one new one was a Treo 700p, obsolete when I bought it - I decided to bite the bullet. I bought …

No matter how much we may not like it, and no matter how insecure it can potentially be, we occasionally have to run Nagios check scripts (written in scripting languages) as root. (On a side note, this method is also used for my MultiBindAdmin project’s DNS file push). Here …

At a remote location, I have a number of machines to monitor but only one IP (dynamic on a residential connection). Most of my remote monitoring with Nagios uses check_by_ssh. Previously, I’d used one host for Nagios to SSH to, and then chained together another check_by_ssh to reach the …

In playing with Puppet (0.24.8 on clients and server) today (well, building a new host) I came by a strange error when I ran puppet on the client:

err: Could not request certificate: Certificate retrieval failed: Invalid pattern css-storemanager

The thing that was so strange is that “css-storemanager …

So, here’s the “official” scoop on the new project that I’m planning/starting to work on. I’m calling it PHPsa for now, and it’s going to (hopefully) be an integrated dashboard/portal for SysAdmins. While there are a number of tools that fit into this general …

Well, I wanted to call this a $#!\^storm, but I don’t think it’s grown to those proportions yet. But any new platform will have its hiccups, and Google is relatively new to the OS world.

So, here’s the news. Google issued a legal Cease and Desist order …

Update July 2011 - We’ve been using rsyslog for our centralized syslog infrastructure at work (site being redesigned at the moment) for about a year now. As a result, our colleagues at Rutgers University Open System Solutions have been nice enough to include rsyslog in their koji build system. Updated …

Yesterday I finally began moving DNS for my sites from GoDaddy to my own in-house system of master/slave BIND9. While both DNS servers are currently at the same location and on the same WAN connection (heck, they’re beind the same router, too), so is all of the rest …

I know I haven’t been posting a lot, but here’s an update on some of my projects:

• PHP EMS Tools - I’ve done quite a bit of work for the ambulance corps, and intend on rolling this into the main distribution. I’ve also added an Asterisk/AGI …

While I’ve read and really appreciate Tom Limoncelli‘s Time Management for System Administrators, the current state of my life (mainly that it’s split between work, personal projects, a freelance client, administering the systems of a the ambulance corps and real people, and that my “work day” is …