The Cult of Gary

The first puppet book is due to come out on February 4. It’s written by James Turnbull. I’ve queued for my next book order. 
There’s a whole world of puppet stuff I don’t know yet. I feel I’m still clubbing my automation problems with the puppet hammer. I find skimming a book usually gets me over the hump.  Then [...]

I’ve spent the afternoon playing with puppet. It’s brilliant and I wish I would have set it up sooner.
My test setup does the following:

creates a file called /tmp/hello_world
makes sure that screen and vim-enhanced
makes sure ntp is installed, running and configured to start (using the default config)
makes sure the perforce cli is installed
make sure snmp is [...]

Friday was my last day at the old job. It was a very bitter-sweet day. Eight years, two months is a long time to be anywhere in the IT world, especially since it has been my only real day job.
The weirdest part was handing in my key, swipe card and garage door clicker. My keychain [...]

There’s another good discussion forming around where to put your crontabs on the SAGE mailing list.
On linux based systems, there are typically 4 places to stick your crontabs:

Where ever crontab -e puts them on your system (per user crons)
/etc/crontab
/etc/cron.daily, /etc/cron.hourly, /etc/cron.weekly and /etc/cron.monthly
/etc/cron.d

My opinion is that crons should go into /etc/cron.d only. They should ideally [...]

There is some discussion on the SAGE-members list regarding network monitoring solutions. The first post was about Zenoss vs. Nagios. I haven’t been involved in the conversation, I’ve only been lurking. 
I have maintained a few Nagios installs, usually configured via fruity. Before my Nagios/Cacti days, I ran a couple of large mon installs. 
I’ve been unsuccessful and [...]

I’m working on building some new linux firewalls right now. It’s the same redundant dual trunked interface setup I’ve been using for a while now. I have two identical boxes that plug into trunk ports the switches. They run heartbeat for fail over.
Here are two things to do when building machines in the real world [...]

When Sysadmin Magazine closed their doors, they decided to send out their complete publication on CD to all the subscribers.
Mine arrived today. It’s pretty neat. The first issue was May/June 1992. I was 11. Some of these ancient articles are awesome looking. A Community-Style Overnight Job Spooler starts off with:
For a small business [...]

Niclas at Aspiring Sysadmin has an article about using checklists. It’s solid advice. I typically call them procedures instead of checklists, but it amounts to the same thing.
I’d just like to add that Wiki’s are the perfect tool for creating procedures and checklists.
First, I find it a lot easier to search and find things on [...]

I think Twiki is one of the best sysadmin tools out there. I’ve been using it in my day to day work for a few years now.
One of my favorite uses is for a Service Journal. This is part of my light weight change management strategy. Each one of my servers gets its own page. [...]

I started flipping through my lastest copy of Sys Admin Magazine and found this in the Syslog/Note from the Editor section:
This is the last issue of Sys Admin Magazine that you will receive. The magazine is ceasing publication as of this issue.
It’s really sad. I looked forward every month to flipping through and reading up. [...]