May 4, 2010 at 7:39pm
Somewhat related to my previous post, Fog Creek Software is looking to add another sysadmin to the team. You’ll be working with my colleague Shawn, who is one of the best in the field.
If you have a solid grasp on networking fundamentals and can get things done in the programming language of your choice, they’re interested in talking to you.
(oh, and ignore the picture in the ad. it’s really old.)
February 10, 2010 at 10:32pm
Today I learned that Bruce Schneier is releasing a replacement for his excellent Practical Cryptography.
January 6, 2010 at 1:21pm
This is a catalog of things UNIX-like/POSIX-compliant operating systems can do atomically, making them useful as building blocks for thread-safe and multi-process-safe programs without mutexes or read/write locks. The list is by no means exhaustive and I expect it to be updated frequently for the foreseeable future.
December 26, 2009 at 9:38pm
Tom Limoncelli is running a survey on sysadmin professionalism, which I recommend any and all who are connected to the field to take.
December 25, 2009 at 7:41am
I know. Advent is only 24 days. Continuing from last year’s “Jordan had no idea advent was only 24 days” tradition, here is a bonus 25th article to wrap up this year’s sysadvent. Enjoy! :)
— SysAdvent Day 25 - Introducing UNIX 4.0!
December 19, 2009 at 3:03pm
A Few Notes on the HP Mini 110
Last night at the Christmas party, Fog Creek gave everyone an HP Mini 110 netbook. Very cool. Once again I’m reminded at how lucky I am to work with those guys.
Out of the box, these guys come with an Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 150GB hard drive, and a copy of Windows 7 Starter Edition. It’s a great box for web surfing, and the battery life is amazing. I’ve had it off of the charger for over 6 hours now and it looks like I might have a couple hours left.
I’m thinking about installing the Ubuntu netbook remix, but I want to hold off and give Windows 7 a chance.
1:59pm
Task Management for Sysadmins
This post over at the SysAdvent blog got me thinking so much that my face nearly melted. The author proposes that sysadmin teams begin implementing Kanban as a general task strategy. It looks like a fantastic choice because it pegs expectations to reality.
I am not entirely sure that I could fully graft it to our small team, but this gives me a great place to start. Even more so than usual, I look forward to going to work on Monday.
More on this later. I have to run to the post office now before the snow gets worse!
December 12, 2009 at 10:25am
ugh, server failure at CrystalTech. And apparently their normal backup process silently fails at backing up VM images.
For those that want to fire off a few snarky comments about Jeff’s loss, go ahead and make one, but then please do yourself and your customers a favor by examining your own backup strategy.
I’ll leave it at that.
December 8, 2009 at 2:53pm
Great idea - an advent calendar geared towards sysadmins of various stripes.
December 6, 2009 at 10:38pm
December 2, 2009 at 7:41am
Reblogged from
awongh
ruby through apache… many hours later
awongh:
Now I’m thinking that it would have gone easier with the other bundled webservers that are supposed to come with rails? Mongrel? or I was also seeing instructions for lighttpd?
Yeah, Ruby deployment is a giant pain in the arse. A typical solution is to use Mongrel, and if Apache is up front, proxy back to it with mod_proxy. It works well, but still, what happened to the good old days of just dropping the files in a directory and not worry about it.
Some alternatives are Heroku (it’s free for small apps) and WebROaR (although I have not tried this one yet).
This has historically be a sore spot, but it is getting much better. The standardization on Rack has really begun to change things for the better.
November 25, 2009 at 9:45am
Shodan is a search engine that allows one to easily scour the internet for machines running specific versions of software, be it an HTTP, FTP, TELNET, or SSH server.
Like about every other piece of technology, it can be classified as ‘dual use’, in that it can be employed in both benevolent and malevolent works. I’m guessing that this one will be used for the latter.
The case would be something like this: a new vulnerability is released for a given version of the Apache or IIS web server, the attacker heads to Shodan to easily compile a list of known servers running that specific version of vulnerable software, and off he goes.
Now, the upside is that sysadmins and security types now know that their systems are being publicly watched, meaning that they are going to have to stay on top of things.
November 24, 2009 at 10:06pm
Cory Doctorow’s latest project. I like what I’ve listened to so far.
