I have long been fascinated by different peoples computing environments. Somehow I believe it shows a little glimpse into someone’s mind. With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to other people as well so I polled a group of my friends who are some of the most influential computing buddies I have. […]
Lately I have been working so hard that I haven’t even had any desire to do any fun computering at home. Today that changed a bit. I decided this morning that it was high time I upgraded my all time favorite rss feed reader, tiny tiny rss. Well, wouldn’t you know it, after I did […]
I have long held the opinion that you should not skimp on the things that you use professionally and frequently. For instance I often tell my peers to make sure they buy decent computers and not just bargain basement models. For some reason it never occurred to me to apply this reasoning to my posterior. […]
First time this happened! A coworker asked me today how to get into his Linux Mint box after he forgot his password. Of course I rattled off the old GRUB way to get things done, but, what?? This is GRUB 2! No so fast there! Turns out it’s quite different. You hold down the shift […]
Bitten by the rsync bug? I was. Apparently in the new RHEL 5.7, and I am sure the RH clones like CentOS, Scientific Linux and ClearOS(?) as well, there is a bug in rsync when you use it with ssh transport like so: rsync -avz -e ssh remotehost:/data /data The fix is to make sure […]
I have seen a lot of commenting on the decision to use a black screen as the boot splash on Linux Mint 11. One person summed it up well when they said that that black screen is indicative in many other operating systems as something going wrong and it tends to scare people. Well, that […]
As a full time Senior Linux System Administrator in real life I was quite interested to get my fingers on this book for a review. After all, the job of a smart sysadmin pretty much dictates scripting away as much of your work as possible. We are a lazy bunch and we call that […]
A friend asked me for a quick primer on how to set up a windows accessible share under RHEL 5, so I thought I would include it here for the benefit of anyone interested. sudo yum -y install samba sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf replace the file with something like so: [global] workgroup = SOMEWORKGROUPNAME server string […]
Probably 50% of a SysAdmin’s job revolves around information. Knowing what is going on with your systems can make all the difference. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking that the more information the better. What you really need is the *correct* information at the appropriate time and it shouldn’t be obfuscated by extra information. […]
Last night on the TechShow I was asked about providing some info on a decent default server build. Here are some quick notes to get people going. Adjust as necessary. Just for ease, here, lets assume you are installing CentOS 5, a nice robust enterprise class Linux for your server needs. CentOS 5 / RHEL […]