Mar 26
Open source software is pretty much pervasive these days. From webservers and DNS to server management and virtualization. Vast swathes of the Internet are built using FOSS technologies. In fact this has been the case for well over a decade, but despite the wide-scale deployment and huge investment of time and energy in open source software you can still find mistrust …
Nov 28
On Wednesday 28th November, I gave a lecture for Queen Mary University of London. The topic was Systems Administration in corporate environments. The target audience was 1st and 2nd year students with no idea of corporate environments. It went fairly well. Hopefully I will be more polished the next time. There were a couple of …
Nov 14
LinuxCon Europe 2012 has just finished and i’m gutted. I was there until day three, the last day of Linuxcon per se, but the co-located events [KVM forum, gluster workshops, etc] were still running and I needed to be there, I absolutely needed to. Unfortunately I don’t get paid to attend events since I’m a Contractor and therefore …
Oct 15
Puppet and Spacewalk are two technologies that do very different tasks but work well together in some specific areas; I always enjoy putting these two together. Spacewalk (the upstream version of Red Hat Satelite) excels at patch management, updates, provisioning and organizing of servers. Puppet is much better at configuration management and complex modifications …
Aug 17
One of my clients has a very rare breed of problem. No its nothing that personal or embarrassing; It’s the need to boot a workstation from Windows to Linux on a regular basis. “Fair enough, But why would anyone want to do this outside the safety of their own home?” I here you ask. It’s true …
Jun 25
I’ve been reasonably busy over the last month; Looking for new contracts, buying some hardware, and reconfiguring the old. I thought it would be interesting to share some of these things to see what people thought of them: Installed Linux Mint on my Netbook: I have a 2 year-old Samsung net-book that originally came with …
Jun 17
I had the chance to spend some time at the Cloud Computing forum at Earls Court on Wednesday. I am not a cloud administrator, but cloud technology is relentlessly encroaching on my areas of expertise, so I took the chance to educate myself. Here are some things I found interesting: The Expo at large: It …
Apr 25
I have contracted for a while, and I’ve seen my share of contractor envy, distrust, and discrimination. However the most common emotion I encounter is envy. At every site I have ever visited, the following conversation has occurred (give or take a few words): them: “Why don’t you go permanent?”. me: “Because I like to …
Mar 29
I once knew a web engineer who wanted to change the name of a corporate website; He wanted apache to stop serving old.myboxes.com and to start serving new.myboxes.com (lets say). Easy enough; after all you can just add the external entry, update the virtual host configuration on your apache instances and bobs your uncle. This …
Mar 17
I’ve always wanted a good set of speakers. Nothing over-expensive and nothing too extravagent; I don’t have the level of appreciation for levels that requires the purchasing of a speaker costing £3000. But I have always wanted a good stereo with enough power that I can hear it throughout my home, and with just enough …
