Articles by Scott Hebert

1. Strategic Management Process

   Posted on June 27, 2011 in IT Management

   A while back, I sent an email describing the strategic management process. Although the email was written for an internal audience, it's generic enough to be reproducible here...

   Strategic Management is a five step process:

   1. Corporate Identity
      This is the definition of the company and is broken down into three …

2. MySQL: Disable DNS Lookups

   Posted on June 27, 2011 in Software

   In a small environment, there's very little reason to rely on DNS resolution inside MySQL. You can disable it by adding skip-name-resolve to your my.cnf or by using the --skip-name-resolve command line argument.

   Remember that if you disable DNS lookups, you will need to set permissions using IP addresses …

3. IT Staff Reduction Isn't Happening

   Posted on June 24, 2011 in IT Management

   ReadWriteWeb is highlighting the recent hubbub around the fact that IT staffs aren't shrinking despite the rapid adoption of cloud computing. It's always been assumed that outsourcing IT infrastructure would result in reductions in IT staffing. Although that is still generally assumed to be the future, recent studies have shown …

4. Cisco: Time-based, Inbound Rate Limiting

   Posted on June 21, 2011 in Networking

   Slaptijack reader Raj is looking for a way to limit inbound traffic on his switch ports based on the time of day. Specifically, he wants to restrict speed to 256 Kbps between 9 AM and 9 PM, and allow up to 1 Mbps the rest of the day. I've done …

5. Installing Unison 2.27.57 via MacPorts

   Posted on June 13, 2011 in System Administration

   I've mentioned before that I use Unison to keep a few important directories synchronized between my various workstations and file server. I made the switch to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS recently, and started using its unison 2.27.57 package. This breaks all of my Macs that use unison 2 …

6. New-Style TACACS+ Configuration

   Posted on June 06, 2011 in networking

   For troubleshooting tips regarding the error message %TAC+: no address for get_server see: Troubleshooting "%TAC+: no address for get_server" on Cisco Devices.

   While working with Cisco Catalyst IOS image 12.2(58)SE1, I noticed that configuration for TACACS+ had changed. My first clue that there was a problem was …

7. Limiting SSH Connections with ufw

   Posted on May 30, 2011 in System Administration

   In the past, I've written about the usefulness of using iptables to limit incoming SSH connections. Although it isn't a replacement for a good password policy, it at least limits the ability of outsiders to perform a brute-force password attack on your system. Now that I've started using Ubuntu more …

8. rsync: on remote machine: --extended-attributes: unknown option

   Posted on May 27, 2011 in System Administration

   rsync: on remote machine: --extended-attributes: unknown option
   

   If this is the output you get when running rsync, you are almost certainly running the Mac OS X version of rsync -E on the client with something else on the server side. The fix is to install the MacPorts version of rsync …

9. ab Results Before and After Server Move

   Posted on May 25, 2011 in System Administration

   

   Behold, the benefits of virtualization!

   I spent most of the evening preparing to move a few websites. I decided to do some benchmarking just to see what sort of improvement I was getting from the new server setup. Although the old server didn't feel slow when browsing sites, the results …

10. Ubuntu: Installing VMware Tools in 10.04 LTS

    Posted on May 23, 2011 in System Administration

    Although this process is well documented on the Ubuntu community site, I decided to take notes of the exact steps that I took so that I wouldn't have to fumble through that long document next time. I'm installing the tools in a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS …

11. WordPress: Tired of Dashes and Quotes Being Rewritten?

    Posted on May 21, 2011 in Software

    Using WordPress to write a technical blog can be occasionally frustrating. WordPress uses the wptexturize() function to rewrite certain ASCII character combinations into HTML entities. Although this may generally be a "good thing," it's really annoying on technical blogs where two dashes is not an em dash.

    To disable this …

12. MySQL Multiple-Column Indexes: Order Matters

    Posted on May 18, 2011 in Programming

    This will just be a short reminder. If you're planning to create multiple-column indexes in MySQL, remember that the order of the columns matters. As the MySQL documentation points out, any "leftmost prefix of the index can be used." This means that the index can be used for any number …

13. How Big is the World of Cloud Computing?

    Posted on May 02, 2011 in System Administration

    

    Via: Wikibon

14. The Influences Driving Virtualization

    Posted on May 02, 2011 in IT Management

    The Influences Driving Virtualization is a new white paper from the guys at ReadWriteWeb. I recently downloaded and read through it. If you're curious about virtualization, but aren't sure about giving up your contact info to ReadWriteWeb, here are some notes about what you'll find after you download.

    "Organizations that …

15. Belkin Ships Disappointment

    Posted on April 28, 2011 in Networking

    My Belkin N1 Vision router replacement arrived today. I was glad it only took two days to arrive. Without the wireless router, I've been stuck working from my desktop. My kids were also pretty annoyed that they couldn't sign into XBox Live or watch Netflix. Needless to say, my sons …