Since so many people seem to have missed all of the communications via facebook (well, I can’t blame them, I spend less time there every time they make an “improvement”), I guess I should give in and post something to my usually-so-professional blog, explaining a bit about what happened …

This question was posted both to the SAGE-members list (thread) and to ServerFault:

Looking for some advice here, as my search has turned up to be pretty fruitless.

My group (9 people - SAs, programmers, and two network guys) is looking for some sort of web tool to… ahem… “facilitate …

I was recently reading an interesting article, “from tasks to assurances: redefining system administration”, by Alva L. Couch, in the April 2010 issue of ;LOGIN:. He makes a lot of good points, mainly that system administration has been defined by tasks, but should really be defined by assurances (a much …

Well, I’ve spend the better part of the last week or so debugging a problem with out new Xen VMs (on one host) not getting DHCP leases. Since our DHCP servers (ISC DHCPd 3.0.6) are using Brian Masney’s LDAP patch (which has recently been included in …

Recently at $WORK we’ve been having some strange issues with a particular Xen VM not getting DHCP. Traditional (tail -f dhcpd.log) debugging hasn’t turned up much, other than the server is getting the DISCOVER but not sending out an OFFER. I’ve turned to packet captures to …

As mentioned in one of my recent posts, I occasionally have to setup catchall pages in Apache. The general idea is usually that I either want a vhost that serves one page for any conceivable request, or that I moved something and want to alert the visitor, but provide a …

I needed a better solution for Dynamic DNS than dyndns.org for something, so I set about setting up DDNS through my BIND9 servers. I found a number of very helpful blog posts, including nsupdate: Painless Dynamic DNS, Painless DDNS part 2: the server, Secure dynamic DNS howto and A …

It’s April 1^st, also known as April Fool’s Day. While I, unfortunately, haven’t planned any pranks or jokes myself this year (I guess I’ve just been too busy), I always try to find as many of Google‘s jokes as possible. Despite being a behemoth …

Yesterday I was installing a new machine at $WORK, and we’d been having some spotty problems with Anaconda not being able to find RPMs in a specific repository. As a result, I was standing in the machine room at a cart-mounted console, watching the output of the installation. Just …

As I mentioned in Downtime past few days, coping with storms, as a result of some things I noticed with a recent power outage, I’ve decided to take the leap to virtualization. Given the cost of current hardware that supports HVM (Intel VT-x or AMD-V ), I immediately …