I’m in the process of moving all of my public-facing services, currently hosted on a single Linode, to a new virtual machine (still with Linode, of course, just a new CentOS 6 VM). Of course, I’ve got a lot (about 60) of DNS records, spread across 8 domains …

I’ve been having some issues that may be Puppet-related. Unfortunately, Puppet (at least the old 0.25.4 client that I’m running) doesn’t timestamp the debug logs sent to stdout. I know it’s hanging somewhere, but I need concrete numbers to look at. Here’s …

I spend a fair amount of my time debugging network and service problems on a few racks of Linux servers. Of course, they’re located in a data center (yes, just downstairs, but still not quite as comfortable as my office), and they’re all command-line only - no sense in …

At work, I’m starting to implement OCS Inventory NG on our Linux boxes to keep track of hardware. Part of the plan is also that we have a MediaWiki installation for internal documentation, and articles for every host (named as the hostname). I’m going to pull data from …

I work as a Linux Sysadmin (among many other non-official titles) in a small group that mainly provides services. We run wireless and student computing labs across a whole campus, but other than that (and most of that) is just back-end systems - web servers, RADIUS, DHCP, etc. As a result …

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 …

Just found this today on one of my all-time favorite sites, XKCD. I swear it’s about me:

At $WORK, the subnet we use for some of our workstations and test boxes was only recently setup with DHCP. Previously, we’d used IP-by-Whiteboard in the office. As a result, most of the recent machines use DHCP, but there are a few older ones still around using static …

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 …

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 …