Blog
Wednesday July 14: Man page of sshdo
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Saturday February 6: Cfengine 3, one year on.
It's been just over a year since Cfengine 3 was released. Over that year I've been using it heavily. My opinion of this latest version has not changed. Cfengine 3 has a lot to offer.
All of the reasons for using Cfengine that I've mentioned before (1 2 3) have never been more true. Don't just listen to me, big companies are embracing Cfengine. Don't get left behind. Find out how Cfengine can help your system administrators spend less time on repairs and more time delivering solutions to your customers. Contact me to find out how.
...Friday September 11: Victory over security audits
It's vicious cycle. Resources are spent auditing hosts. Many more are spent fixing all of the audit's deficiencies. Then it's back to business as usual. Time passes and hosts slowly degrade until the next audit. Repeat.
...Friday August 21: Cfengine 3 Tutorial
Cfengine is a configuration management tool that allows a system administrator to configure multiple hosts continuously. Cfengine runs as a client/server application. The server provides new configurations, or policy, while the client works to ensure that a client host conforms to them.
...Sunday May 10: Choosing a host naming convention
In the following I will talk about the different types of naming conventions that I’ve experienced or read about. I’ll discuss the pros and cons of each. Before we get to that we’ll need to have a small refresher on domain name services.
...Sunday March 8: Unix CheatSheet
This has been moved to the new cheatsheets section.
...Friday February 6: Support for open source projects
Many believe that open source projects cannot be used in the enterprise because of the lack of support. This is untrue.
Many believe that only proprietary software can offer support accompanied by a service level agreement. In fact many open source projects have a commercial arm for the very purpose of offering support contracts. For open source projects that do not have commercial arms many third party consulting companies can pick up the slack. Consulting firms large and small have standard...
Friday November 28: Cfengine Cookbook
Cfengine is a configuration management tool that can centrally manage the configuration of UNIX servers. When discussing configuration management a common limiting thought is that it applies only to like systems. Render farms and other distributed server groups are typically configured nearly identical. It is in this environment that many administrators think to deploy a tool like Cfengine.
...Thursday October 23: Patching Solaris with Patch Check Advanced
Patch Check Advanced is an open source third party tool that claims to be superior to Sun's smpatch tool. PCA was first published in 2003. PCA can generate patch reports, download and install patches based upon both Sun's and the user's criteria. PCA can even be used to report on or patch systems that do not have Internet access.
...Tuesday October 21: Clustering with Redhat
This report presents an overview of how to build a DB2 service cluster. This procedure can be useful in learning how to setup clusters for other services.
...Monday October 20: Enterprise system administration using configuration management
When talking about system administration in this paper I am referring to the act of maintaining UNIX hosts and their services. System administration is more than this but for this paper I will discuss only a subset of system administration skills which I call configuration management. Configuration management is the act of creating new hosts and maintaining existing ones and their services according to the specifications of an organization's policies.
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