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 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
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 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”
Background Automated deployment is obviously not new, but until this point, there was not much push in the open source world. Recently, the idea of DevOps or Ops 2.0 is gaining ground. We are starting to think of our deployment and provisioning methods more like software engineers. We are developing tools to help us provision
Continue Reading “DevOps Toolchain: Problems with Automated Deployment, Data & Workflow”
Continue Reading “DevOps Toolchain: Problems with Automated Deployment, Data & Workflow”
Background Scripting & Automation has been a goal since the beginning of Unix and, let me state, that I believe that it is possible to achieve a Fully Automated Provisioning system in our production environments. In fact, I think it is essential that we develop fully automated provisioning systems to keep up with the rate
Continue Reading “Scripting & Automation: The Qualitative to Quantitative Workflow”
I will be giving an introduction to DevOps ((http://dev2ops.org/blog/2010/2/22/what-is-devops.html)) and the DevOps Toolchain ((http://code.google.com/p/devops-toolchain/wiki/DevOps)) at the Akron Linux Users Group (ALUG) ((http://groups.google.com/group/AkronLUG/web/alug-home-page)), held at the New Era Restaurant at 10 Massillon Rd. Akron Ohio (See map below) Often development and operations seem to have competing goals. Development is the gas, while operations is often perceived
Background Caching between a browser and an origin server is controlled by request and response headers . Quite often these headers are misunderstood by users and business owners, so it is important that we as systems administrators and developers understand them well. Secondly, caching can have an impact on web site performance and bandwidth usage.
Continue Reading “Browser & Web Server Cache Control Headers 101”
Background Understanding the basic interaction between a web server and a web browser is critical for a beginning systems administrator or web developer. Basically, text is sent back and forth in a way that is specified by the HTTP protocol. Several versions of the protocol exist, but the details are not required to understand the
Abstract This presentation was created for the Akron Linux Users Group in September 2009. It is a brief overview of several home grown tools and several from the wild. All of the tools used in this presentation are freely down-loadable and all but DejaClick are Open Source. This presentation enumerates philosophy and applied techniques in