I recently wrote this to highlight real world use cases where I believe LLMs/Generative can actually help. Instead of fluff, I tried to break down real challenges for sysadmins. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3482087/what-generative-ai-can-do-for-sysadmins.html
Tag: Systems Administration
Part 1: Asking Other Teams to Do Something Really Hard
Background There’s a common move with software teams; one team will ask another team to do something really hard so that the first team can do something really easy. Most of the time, we don’t even mean to do it. But, it causes a lot of stress and wastes a lot of time. It reminds
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Linux Container Crisis Tools
I want to highlight a great post by Brendan Gregg: Linux Crisis Tools. He does a walk through of a scenario that strikes me as very realistic, and brings back memories from my 15 years managing Linux servers. You can tell he has real-world sysadmin experience. I think that’s key for being a good thought
The State of Enterprise Linux in 2023
Introduction Are you a professional Linux Systems Administrator, Architect, or Site Reliability Engineer? Do you use Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or a derivative in the course of your work? Do you find it difficult to keep up with all of the changes that have been going on with RHEL in the last few
Upgrading from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.4 with Red Hat Universal Base Image
Today, I noticed that the WordPress Admin Console was complaining that I was using PHP 7.2 which is getting old. I was kind of dreading upgrading because upgrades are a nightmare, but then I realized I had put everything in containers. One of the things that makes containers awesome is how easy it is to
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Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About…
Update January 3rd, 2022: Please see: The State of Enterprise Linux in 2022 Change is hard. Explaining that change in a way that makes sense is hard. Not getting frustrated when someone is explaining change to you, or while explaining it is hard. We are all human, so please be patient. But, before you
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A Comparison of Linux Container Images
Updated 06/02/2020 Understanding Container Images To fully understand how to compare container base images, we must understand the bits inside of them. There are two major parts of an operating system – the kernel and the user space. The kernel is a special program executed directly on the hardware or virtual machine – it
Setting Up RHEL 8 on Linode
Background I have used Linode for about 10 years now because the service and price are great. They are one of the most automated cloud providers and they invest in tools to do things like resizing existing VMs. It’s super useful for lab environments and experiments. As such, I wanted to use Linode for my
A Concise Introduction to DevSecOps
Why Should I Care About DevSecOps? Are you a frustrated security professional, trying to get your organization to change (aren’t we all)? Or perhaps, you are trying to get management to value security more? Or maybe, you are a security conscious Developer (wait, do those actually exist? Yes, yes, they do) or Sysadmin who knows
Hacker’s Guide to Installing OpenShift Container Platform 3.11
Background My problem, like most technologists, is that I only have a slice of my time to dedicate toward acquiring and maintaining knowledge about any given technology, product, project, tool, platform, etc. Split that with the fact that almost every CIO is preaching that we, as technologists, need to be closer to the business, and
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