{{Google Apps: The Missing Manual}} by {{Nancy Conner}} was a great book. In 2008. Today? Not nearly so much. So much has changed in the Google landscape in the last few years (or even months) that, sadly, much of the content is now quaint, or just out-and-out wrong. It’s too bad – because the book …
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Category:technical
bufferapp.com – schedule social media posts
I learned about bufferapp.com this week – finally a way to not overload Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc with posts – and put them in relevant venues easily. Thanks, Passive Panda.
haiku mirror
I am now running an official Haiku mirror: haiku.datente.com. Alpha 4.1 has been released, and you can get a copy from any of the mirrors.
establishing a data haven cloud
In {{Neal Stephenson}}’s seminal book, {{Cryptonomicon}}, he describes the creation of a “data haven” in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Why has no-one started building such a service (or, at least not in a public way) on existing cloud services (eg {{AWS}} or Rackspace) and/or create their own global network? Data backup and replication is not …
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next bglug meeting – 25 oct at 1900 (7p) – @collexion hackerspace
Topic is yet TBD – but the time and place are set: 25 Oct 1900 Collexion hackerspace Come join us!
mirror status – m0n0wall
The locale needs to be updated (from Philadelphia to Germany), but I have been reinstated as a m0n0wall mirror. I noticed that downloads had dropped-off over the past few months, and after contacting Manuel Kasper (the creator/maintainer of m0n0wall), found out that the mirror script he runs to maintain an active list had dropped me …
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thoughts on vilt
Over the years, I have taken (and given) a lot of training. I’ve had self-paced tutorials (printed and electronic), in-person lectures, hand-on labs, small groups, formal classes, one-on-one tutoring, and virtual instructor led training (VILT). I’ve seen two distinct types of VILT – good and bad. I have yet to see any “ok” training. It’s …
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restful webservices
My friend Steven recently wrote about linguistics in webservices. In it he postulates that since all “good code” should resemble speech, webservices should use linguistically-tied approaches to their APIs. In short, it’s an article on RESTful websites being used in a linguistically-understandable way. For example: http://searchengine.com/search/keyword1/keyword2/not:keyword3 should run your query against the search engine, so …
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automation
I have been deeply involved in data center management and automation for well over 5 years. Most companies still view automation the Wrong Way™, though – and it’s a hard mindset to change. Automation is NOT about reducing your headcount, or reducing hiring. Automation is used to: improve the efficiency of business tasks improve employee productivity reduce human …
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the pros and cons of “gamification”
Slashdot has a post on gamification in the workplace today. One of the myriad replies was from a poster, gomoX, who was pushing his company’s gamified tech support tool (invgate.com/en/service-desk/gamification). I’m all for product placement and pushing when it’s relevant (and here it most certainly was), but I don’t like the general concepts in that …
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on twitter and the police
Dave Winer had an interesting take on the recent Twitter-NYPD flare-up. Personally, the thought of any government organization demanding records without a warrant is abhorrent. However, since the entire point of Twitter is to make your tweets public … then what is there to subpoena? They’re all out there – visible to the world… Unless the user …
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some great finds
Diagram.ly – it’s sorta like Visio, but free, and web-based. Meetings.io – like webex, including conference calling and file and screen sharing. Qama – a calculator that doesn’t give an answer until you provide a “reasonable” guess. Udacity – a free computer science program. Urbanchickens – dedicated to raising chickens in “non-traditional” environments (like cities).
automatically returning a host to the unprovisioned server pool in hpsa
In conjunction with the customized PXE process I wrote about previously, it could be highly desirable to be able to return a server to the unprovisioned server pool in HP’s Server Automation. This is a specifically-Linux procedure: though I’m sure something similar can be done with Windows*. run an ad-hoc script against a target server that …
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gee, thanks red hat, amd, and vmware
At least the publicly-searchable knowledge base had something. I tried searching for “Kernel panic – not syncing: Fatal Exception” and “RIP” and “cpuid4_cache_lookup”. And wouldn’t you know it! There’s a known issue if you try to install RHEL >5.4 x64 on ESXi 4.x if it’s running on AMD 6000 series CPUs. Guess what – we’re …
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not enough cpus
I found an interesting reference that indicates that for x86, the maximum number of CPUs the Linux kernel can handle is 255. I’d presume that it’s the same for Windows. I’m curious – right now this is a rather large limit: but it won’t be for long! 16 core CPUs are available from AMD today. I …
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symlinks and nfs
I recently discovered an interesting “feature” of symbolic links in conjunction with NFS mounts: they don’t work! For example, let’s say you have the following NFS export: /media/files Inside of that export, you have the following path: /media/files/isos/osmedia/linux/ubuntu In *this* directory, you have a symlink called ‘current‘, which points to a different location: current -> …
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mounting a cd in an rhel6 vm
Most typically in the past, I have seen mounts for CDs in RHEL work thusly: mount /dev/hdc /mnt In RHEL6 you need to do the following: mount /dev/sr0 /mnt I’d really like to know why Red Hat made the change, but knowing is useful 🙂
vmware tools can be quietly installed
Came across this little gem recently: /path/to/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl –default EULA_AGREED=yes That’s been a life saver a lot recently 🙂
storage strategies – part 4
Last time I talked about storage robustifiers. In the context of a couple applications with which I am familiar, I want to discuss ways to approach balancing storage types and allocations. Storage Overview Core requirements of any modern server, from a storage standpoint, are the following: RAM swap Base OS storage OS/application log storage Application …
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storage strategies – part 3
In part 2, I introduced SAN/NAS devices, and in part 1, I looked as the more basic storage type, DAS. Today we’ll look at redundancy and bundling/clustering of storage as a start of a robust storage approach. Before I go any further, please note I am not a “storage admin” – I have a pretty broad …
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storage strategies – part 2
Continuing my series on storage strategies and options (see part 1), today I want to briefly look at SAN and NAS options. First, storage area networks. SANs are “dedicated network[s] that provides access to consolidated, block level data storage”. Storage presented to a target server appears to the machine as if it is a “real” …
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storage strategies – part 1
In follow-up to my previous article about bind mounts, here is the first in a series on storage strategies (while everything contained in this series is applicable to desktops and laptops, the main thrust will be towards servers). Today we’ll look at local/simple storage options (DAS – both the spinning and solid-state varieties). The most …
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binding your mounts
Over the past several years, I have grown quite fond of the ability to do bind mounts on Linux. First, a little background. Most applications have specific directory structure requirements. Many have wildly varying space requirements depending on how a given install is utilized. For example, HPSA can use anywhere from 40-400-4000 gigabytes of space …
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using social media at/for/with work
I am very curious to know how people utilize social media in relation to work: blogging tweets etc I know it’s not horribly scientific, but if you’d be willing to participate in this inquiry, please leave a comment. I’ll be putting up a more formal poll in the coming days. Thanks!
a plea for following standards
If you ever install or setup something that someone else will have to maintain, please, please, please follow as close as possible the vendor’s typical installation process. And whether you go “standard” or not, please, please, please document everything you do! Those of us who will come after you will be intensely grateful for your …
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