AI-enabled developer productivity, build systems, and engineering leadership
Posted on in System Administration
I manage servers and network devices that, for a variety of reasons, allow users to connect via SSH from anywhere in the world. Although the traffic generated by these connections is encrypted, leaving this open to the world does present a bit of a security risk. Would-be crackers use compromised …
Posted on in System Administration
Those that know me may have heard me rant about my "Reverting Mac Dock Icon Problem." The problem is this: I have put a folder on my Dock and every time I log out or reboot, the icon reverts from my custom icon to the default folder icon. To fix …
Posted on in System Administration
A few days ago, while reloading DNS on a server, I noticed an issue in the log:
Jul 31 11:29:50 admin named[6098]: the working directory is not writable
First, let's talk about how this error was caught. When doing various tasks, I often tail the log to …
Posted on in System Administration
My pager went off Saturday morning with the following alert: "/dev/hda6 is read-only!"
I can't remember the last time I received this alert. The filesystem in question is the home of this web site, as well as a few others. Being read-only isn't a major problem since most of …
Posted on in System Administration
A colleague of mine is not fond of backup <acronym title="Mail eXchange">MX</acronym> hosts. He (correctly) points out that all incoming mail should be transmitted through another mail server anyway, so the backup MX hosts only serves as an attack point for spammers.
For the most part I …
Posted on in System Administration
I recently started messing around with building my own Facebook application. I figured the best way to start learning was to download the demo application and get it working on the Slaptijack web server. I quickly ran into a problem:
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_encode()
The problem …
Posted on in System Administration
If you've been reading Slaptijack for a while, you might remember that I've been doing personal backups with rsync and hard links. The hard links conserve disk space by making sure I don't have multiple copies of the same file lying around.
I recently added a new drive to my …
Posted on in System Administration
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 …
Posted on in 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 …Posted on in 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 …
Posted on in 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 <acronym title="Internet Service …
Posted on in 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 …
Posted on in System Administration
I recently installed Microsoft Windows XP Pro in Parallels Desktop on my iMac. After going through the usual motions of updates and tweaks, I set up my user account so that I wouldn't be using the built-in Administrator account. After rebooting the virtual machine, I noticed that on restart, I …
Posted on in System Administration
When working in an office environment, it's very easy to gather multiple administrators into one office and show them how a task is done. If, on the other hand, your administrators are spread out, these impromptu meetings are nearly impossible. GNU Screen (in multiuser mode) can solve all your problems …
Posted on in System Administration
Although this site isn't about job searches, the fact of the matter is that most network and system administrators have an interest in getting paid for their efforts. (Personally, I didn't get into Cisco networking for the glamorous parties with Paris Hilton, but maybe you did?)
J.D. at Get …
