Hello from our new Dell Vostro 1500 laptop!
We just got this laptop for my wife to use at home, but I thought I should spend a few minutes getting everything up and working (and blog about it). Generally speaking, I’m a Mac guy, but this laptop is pretty sweet and the price was right. [...]

Categories: System Administration

This is just a quick note for you DNS operators out there.
Mark Andrews of ISC has notified the bind-announce mailing list that L.ROOT-SERVERS.NET has changed it’s ip address to 199.7.83.42. Mark’s suggested method for updating your BIND hints file is as follows:
$ dig ns . @a.root-servers.net > newfile
My configuration uses a file [...]

Categories: System Administration

This comes up pretty infrequently, but I think it’s worth knowing. I specifically had a situation where I was greping hostnames out of a file. Personally, I like hostnames to appear in all uppercase, but this file was full of hostnames in all lowercase. You can solve the problem with tr.
$ echo [...]

Categories: System Administration

You may run into a case where you are running a name server (perhaps a caching-only name server) that is not allowed to communicate with Internet name servers. The most common case for this is a local caching name server being blocked by a corporate or ISP firewall.
If you are set on using your [...]

Categories: System Administration

Personally, my data isn’t so important that I need to keep years of it backed up to tape. Obviously, that isn’t always the case in a corporate environment, but luckily that’s not a problem for me.
That being said, I do like to have at least a week’s worth of backups just in case I [...]

Categories: System Administration