SysAdmin


FAST 2010 Proceedings Available

Posted on March 6, 2010

I've missed FAST 2010 yet again.... but, good news! The complete FAST 2010 Proceedings (PDF) are available for free. USENIX members can also view the presentation videos online.

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Solaris Spit & Polish

Posted on February 10, 2009

An interesting discussion has been taking place on the OpenSolaris SysAdmin Community list, and I sense it will lead us toward some important changes in Solaris. Essentially it all comes down to the lack of spit and polish. What has always been something we perhaps ignored or downplayed has become far more starkly contrasted by truly easy to use yet complex things such as ZFS or SMF. The clearest examples are technologies that currently ...

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Storage Trends from SNIA SDC

Posted on October 1, 2008

The Storage Networking Industry Association's (SNIA) Storage Developer Conference (SDC) is not, as the fancy name suggests, not a place for storage hobbyist or the light hearted. Attendees are leaders in our industry, highly informed and knowledgeable. If they are interested in it, we all will be soon. If you follow the storage press at all, the two big things on their mind won't surprise you: De-duplication Solid State Disk (SSD) ...

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The very first episode of SA Pro is here! In the podcast we'll use one of two formats, classic 1-on-1 interview style and a round-table discussion format. This episode is the latter. Together with Joe Moore of Siemens and Mark Imbriaco of 37signals we discuss the following questions: What is the mark of a good SA? What are the essential qualifications? Does formal education and/or certs matter? Whats really new and ...

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If 10 years ago someone said "One day your wife will carry an extra hard drive in her purse", I'd have rolled my eyes. On a recent trip to pick up a hard drive (to replace the piece of crap that died in my MacBook Pro; so far every Apple laptop we've owned has had an OEM drive die) I saw, to my amazement, this: CaseLogic, the folks that made those CD cases we all used to have in our cars, is now making neoprene sleeves for 2.5" hard ...

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A couple things here and there have kept me from continuing my series of posts regarding systems management solutions. One of the monitoring solutions I've planned to write about it Up.Time. While I haven't had the time to write it, I was thrill to check my favorite site, SunHelp.org, and see that Super Admin Bill Bradford wrote an excellent review himself: Software Review: up.time 4 Enterprise Monitoring. In my professional opinion, ...

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The Joy of IPMI

Posted on December 27, 2007

Chances are you've heard of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface, or IPMI. And chances are very good that you view it as little more than a way to remotely reboot servers. But IPMI is oh so much more than that... wonders await you, should you just take the time to explore a little. So lets start with the basics and work outwards. Almost any modern server is going to have a Baseboard Management Controller, or BMC for short, on ...

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Monitoring with Zabbix

Posted on December 17, 2007

With a new site comes new opportunity. When Joyent recently added a new facility I decided to look at new monitoring solutions. We previous were standardized on Sun X4100, Sun T1000's, and Sun X4500's with a network using Force10 and F5. This new site would replace the X4100's with Sun X4150's and Dell 2950's. Having largely avoided Dell in the past I took my time to get to know the system well and knowing that IPMI is far more utilized in ...

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Digging Deeper: Systems Management

Posted on December 6, 2007

I've recently been delving deeper into the area of systems management. At Joyent we have a variety of unique problems that I've not faced in the past. For instance, I have a largely non-heterogeneous environment, we have strict controls on what we use and always strive to be as consistent as possible. We also have more machines than I've ever managed before, while I've worked in many very large environments I typically worked on big iron ...

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Talk Like A Pirate Day: Sept 19th

Posted on September 17, 2007

Talk Like A Pirate Day is coming on Wed, the 19th. Be prepared to either: A) Have fun annoying your coworkers, or B) Bring your boxing gloves to beat the sh*t out of your annoying coworkers.

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