KVM Virtualization 101

Background For those of you who are familiar with virtualization, KVM is a hypervisor which is built into the Linux Kernel. This allows a Linux desktop or server to simulate multiple pieces of hardware, which can then have different operating systems installed. KVM uses the QEMU virtual machine format. QEMU may be familiar to those

Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 2

Background In Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 1, I laid out a blueprint for using documentation as the bootstrap for entry into an operations environment. In this article I will dig into the three main concepts mentioned in Part 1. In Part 3, I will demonstrate our use case for a data center of about

Uptime: Does it matter with the modern web service?

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