I had an awesome time at Ohio Linux Fest 2010. I met a lot of interesting people, caught several really good talks and had a chance to take the LPIC 101 and 102 tests. It was a great mix of hobbyists, systems administrators and programs and I took it as an opportunity to expand my
Tag: Systems Administration
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
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Continue Reading “Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 2”
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
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Continue Reading “Uptime: Does it matter with the modern web service?”
Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 1
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.
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Unix/Linux Signals 101
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
Unix/Linux Filesystem Permissions 101
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
Centralized Logging System, Analysis, and Troubleshooting
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
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DevOps Toolchain: Problems with Automated Deployment, Data & Workflow
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
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Continue Reading “DevOps Toolchain: Problems with Automated Deployment, Data & Workflow”
Scripting & Automation: The Qualitative to Quantitative 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
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Introduction to DevOps
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