Last week Ksplice announced free no-reboot kernels for Fedora which sparked off some interesting conversation about uptime over at the Standalone Sysadmin. Honestly, I ran across Ksplice a while back and I thought to myself, huh that might be useful for a certain niche, I added to a wiki page that I use to track
Continue Reading “Uptime: Does it matter with the modern web service?”
Continue Reading “Uptime: Does it matter with the modern web service?”
Bootstrapping and rooting are two concepts often associated with computing, but not the documentation of computing environments. Sometimes concepts such as these are called design patterns and I would like to try and introduce a new pattern called Documentation Bootstrapping. I think this is a critical pattern for the creation of any successful and useful documentation.
Continue Reading “Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 1”
Background Last year was the first time that I made it to the Ohio Linux Fest and it was a blast. I met a bunch of the volunteers from the Fedora project, learned about the One Laptop Per Child projects success, and was finally pushed over the edge to write some open source software. This
Abstract This presentation was created for the PyOhio 2010 conference. It gives an overview of Artificial Ignorance, command line graphing, and word counts with petit. It also gives a quick examples of weekly and monthly reporting when dealing with a syslog server which records switch, router, firewall, and server logs. Presentation
Background Unix/Linux allows a user to have control over a program that they are running by sending what are called signals. These signals are then normally handled by the program in a way that is compliant with Unix/Linux standards. Two of the most important signals that are commonly sent to a program are called SIGTERM
Debian Squeeze is in testing and with it Petit is available to be installed through the repository. That means it can be installed easily through apt, like so. apt-get install petit I would like to thank Carl Chenet for helping me get petit into Debian Squeeze. Now I have to work on getting it in
Background Standard Unix filesystem permissions are less complex than Windows file system permissions and Linux ACLs. Though, this lacks flexibility which is sometimes needed, In many cases it can be leveraged as an advantage. Often the complexity of ACLs can allow administrators to create file system permissions which are cumbersome to audit and document. The
Background Recently, I started a project at (www.eyemg.com) to migrate from VMWare to KVM. Our standard server deployment is based on RHEL5 running on HP DL380 hardware. Given our hardware/software deployment, it made sense to align ourselves with Red Hat’s offering of KVM. We are able to achieve feature parity with VMware server while adding
Background This script was developed last year to give a quick and dirty analysis of the Snort alert log. In typical fashion, it’s is far from perfect, but approximately right is better than absolutely wrong. Obviously, the intersects could be combined in new and creative ways, this is just one that works for us. Also,
Continue Reading “Snort Alert Log: Simple Analysis and Daily Reporting with Arnold and Petit”
Continue Reading “Snort Alert Log: Simple Analysis and Daily Reporting with Arnold and Petit”
Background Building a feature complete centralized logging system that provided the ability to trouble shoot problems and pro-actively find new issues before they became service outages was a top priority when I first started at (www.eyemg.com). I call it feature complete because it has successfully done both for us without spending too much time of
Continue Reading “Centralized Logging System, Analysis, and Troubleshooting”