Most commented posts
- Foreman on Debian – Install issues — 2 comments
- Coincidence — 2 comments
- Don’t Panic — 1 comment
- Centralized Logging — 1 comment
Author's posts
Nov 20
Oversight and Documentation
When you have an environment as big as ours is, there absolutely needs to be processes in place to manage things coming in, existing things, and things going out. That is why I haven’t been posting much recently – I’ve been stuck trying to fix this problem because those processes are either not written down, …
Oct 23
Bugs in limits
I came across a new one yesterday; well, not really a new one, but a not particularly well documented one. It seems to be a problem that was found in CentOS 5, and has at least on some level persisted into Cent 6 as well. The problem as noted stems from attempting to raise the …
Sep 12
Amplification Attacks and Your Response
Amplification attacks are frustrating, whether you are the target of the flood or you find your system has been taking part in one. The concept is simple — there are two core items: You send a small string to a UDP-based service and you get a large response back. You spoof your IP address so …
Aug 17
Cleaning Up from the Last Guy
It’s inevitable, really, as we move through our careers we won’t just be joining teams but replacing people and taking over their previous duties. We also have a tendency to blame many things about the infrastructure on the last guy who ran it. In my duties as a sysadmin and technical account manager I’ve had …
Jun 07
PagerDuty Review
I’m always looking for ways to improve both internal and external services and tools because I believe that to stagnate is bad. Just because what we have works, doesn’t mean we can’t make it better. If we can make it better in a cost-effective way, why aren’t we doing that? It is in that vein …
Apr 16
Surviving a Provider Outage
Last year, EIG (or the Endurance International Group) suffered a major outage in one of their facilities in Utah, impacting a number of customers on their Bluehost, Hostgator and Hostmonster brands, possibly among others. Today they have been down for close to 6 hours and counting leaving customers with services ranging from a small shared …
Apr 12
Foreman on Debian – Install issues
A few weeks ago I noticed that as a result of an upgrade, puppet-dashboard had removed itself from the system it ran on. No big deal, I wasn’t really using it and it put a number of more important packages on the removal list if I made the required changes to keep it. Since then I’ve …
Mar 17
Employee Satisfaction
I have this theory which roughly states that an employees loyalty to a company is directly proportional to their satisfaction level. This seems obvious, but there are many things which apply to this which aren’t often taken into account, because the number one thing we consider is remuneration – I think this is wrong. Sure, …
Mar 08
RAID vs. Backup
Occasionally you hear the words “I don’t need backup, I have RAID!” or similar phrases. You may have even used them yourself once or twice. They are not the same. Though both are intended to maintain uptime, they perform two different functions which serve two different purposes. Both of them are defense mechanisms against disaster, but …
Mar 01
Centralized Logging
We all know how important logs are, I use them regularly to find why the automated firewall blocked an IP address or to figure out an error in the apache config or the problem with the Asterisk phone tree. I also know that our network engineers use them to identify problems with switches or routers …