Background Dave Egts will be presenting “User confinement with SELinux in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: Easily letting users get their job done, and that’s it” Schedule Room Opens 6:30pm, Dinner 7-8pm, presentation 8-9pm
Author: fatherlinux
Lately, I have worked for Red Hat, the largest open source software company in the world. Through a variety of roles in my career, I have played key roles in building, maintaining, marketing, and selling open source software products and services.
In years past I was a social media start-up veteran, e-commerce old timer, and weathered government research technologist. This has led to experience in a variety of companies and organizations ranging from a seven person start-up to a 8,000 person technology company. This has culminated in a unique perspective on open source software development, delivery, and maintenance.
Monitoring Data Structure Metrics
I finished reading this article on High Scalability entitled, Troubleshooting Response Time Problems – Why You Cannot Trust Your System Metrics and it reminded me of why I developed a Cacti graphing plugin for monitoring sockets, pipes and files.
Cleveland Python Users Group (CLEPY) May 9th
Background Jumpstart: how to do a start up / get involved in entrepreneurship. MeetUp Link
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Going to Red Hat
Well, it’s official, I have accepted a position at Red Hat. I am excited because Red Hat is a company that I have wanted to work with since I started using Linux 1998. For Red Hat, I will be a Solutions Architect for Enterprise Linux, also known as a technology evangelist. Now, it’s my job
Do Rockstar Sysadmins Exist
A couple of weeks ago, I heard the owner of our company talking on the phone to a client. In the conversation, he referred to me as a rockstar sysadmin. Thankfully, he wasn’t talking about my singing. I chuckled a bit, but didn’t think too much of it. I mean, it feels good to be
Designing a Robust Monitoring System
Reading Ted Dziuba’s article Monitoring Theory article, I was reminded of several conventions that I have developed over the years to help with monitoring servers, network devices, software services, batch processes, etc. First, break down your data points into levels so that you can decide how to route them. Second avoid interrupt driven technology like email, it lowers your productivity and prohibits good analysis techniques.
Akron Linux User Group (ALUG) April 7th
Background Gaurav Saxena will be giving a talk on Perl Slides & Code Slides are here (hosted on google documents) Code files are here (hosted on github)
The Logs Are an Approximation of Reality
The logs are an approximation of reality and they cannot be taken as canonical or gospel. This is true in several senses. Logs can give insight to the standard investigative questions of who, what, when, where, and why, but almost always requires other information to truly answer all of these questions.
Today, Postfix reiterated this lesson for me. I had a problem where our gateway mail server couldn’t deliver mail to a peer. The receiving mail server kept bouncing the email address with a 550 even though the mailbox being delivered to was real and active. Gmail, Yahoo, and MSN would all accept email from our gateway, but this one provider would not accept email. Of course, it wasn’t a simple problem. We had a web server running Apache/PHP delivering to the local Sendmail server which forwarded to a Post fix gateway server, which then tried to deliver to an Exim server which received for the destination email address.
I am not going to dig into all of the details, but of course, the first thing I did was go to the logs. The problem is, the logs were wrong! In the following examples, the users and domains in the logs have been changed to be anonymous, but the logs are real.Securing FTP with VSFTPD and SSL
Decade of Storage: Analysis of Data Costs
Yesterday, I noticed this interesting tidbit from Rackspace calculating the cost of data over the last Decade of Storage. Of course, there a few bumps in the road that made me chuckle. Interestingly, in the last couple of years it plots the cost from $0.40/GB to $0.06/GB. This ties together a whole bunch of things that I have thought about over the last couple of years. First, now is a wonderful time to be a user buying storage for personal audio and video. Second, regular people are going to have to start to learn data management strategies. Finally, this cost isn’t even close to what it is for me in my data center. It is easy for us to celebrate the cheap cost of raw storage while loosing track of the total cost of ownership for data. I will elaborate.
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