The trend on the Sysadmin Subreddit this week has been talking about the struggles of management, what the lowly team members might not realize their team lead or manager is having to deal with, and resenting them accordingly. Coming off this, combined with some recent personal experiences, I was thinking about what I value the most in …
Category: A Matter of Opinion
Oct 04
Personal Experience is Personal Reality
When everyone in a room shares a similar perception, people tend to get along and understand each other even if they disagree with that perception being right or wrong. As soon as someone in that rooms has a personal perception that is at odds with the remainder, they become a shard of the group and …
Apr 13
Upgrading OwnCloud (or, keep up to date to avoid issues)
It turns out that OwnCloud is a finicky piece of software. After being defeated in my attempts to update, I grew determined to win. Premise: We have a CentOS 6 x64 server running OC, v7.0.2. Current release is 9.0.1, but OC doesn’t support direct upgrades between major versions, and it wasn’t even as simple as …
Apr 10
Why do I need my own backups?
“My provider already has them,” “It’s not that important, anyway,” “backup tools are (too hard|too expensive|too complicated|not possible in my environment).” “Everyone wants restore, no-one wants backup.” AdminZen, Part 6, Backups, point 1. Too many times recently I’ve seen excuses like the above for not having backups, followed shortly by long tirades about how it’s …
Mar 13
Building for High Availability
There are several principles to consider when designing and building a system for high availability, so called 100% Uptime. Firstly, what is the budget? Cost constraints will invariably determine how high that availability is. For this exercise, we’re going to focus on a virtual environment in which the VMs will have 100% Uptime. Constraining factors: Power: …
Feb 13
Datacenters 101
A lot of people have specific ideas when you say “Datacenter” — dark ambient light, lots of bright lights from servers (hopefully lots of green and blue, and not so much yellow or red). Some big datacenter providers put a lot of effort into that “cool” factor, going out of their way to keep overhead lights …
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, …
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 …