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TPOSANA launched 15 years ago today!
15 years ago today (or August 24, 2001 depending on who you talk to) the first edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration reached bookstores. We had been working on the book for 2+...
View ArticleDiscounts on The Practice books until Sept 19!
Pearson is doing their annual "Back to Business" sale until Monday, September 19. You can save 35-45%, which is a big deal IMHO. The Practice of Cloud System Administration is 35% off, or 45% off if...
View ArticleWhy Google should buy Twitter
[Disclaimer: I do not work for Google or Twitter; I have no investments in Google or Twitter. ] Google should buy Twitter. (link to rumors here) Twitter isn't a good "MBA runs the numbers" acquisition....
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DevOps Handbook hitting stores Oct 6!
One of the most anticipated DevOps books in years is about to start shipping! DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, & Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim,...
View ArticleWatch my Punk Rock DevOps talk live on Friday at 2:30pm PT
My talk "DevOps Where You Wouldn't Have Expected" will be live-streamed from PuppetConf on Friday, Oct 21 at 2:30pm PT / 5:30 ET. The talk happens to summarize the major points of Chapter 1-4 of the...
View ArticleUsenix LISA '16 Early Bird Registration Deadline is November 10!
The "Early Bird Registration" deadline is November 10, 2016. After that, the price goes up. LISA is Dec 4-9 and you can register here. I'll be teaching 2 tutorials and Christine Hogan and I will be...
View ArticleSearching random data is not an O(N) problem.
The September/October issue of ACM Queue Magazine has a column I wrote about how to search random data. In theory the best you can do is a linear search. I came up with 10 ways to do better....
View ArticlePre-Order Kindle edition of 3rd edition of TPOSANA
The Kindle edition of the 3rd Edition of "Volume 1: The Practice of System and Network Administration" can now be pre-ordered. Previously you could only pre-order the paper and PDF versions. The new...
View ArticleDo you teach System Administration?
You do? Then you should attend SESA '16 in Boston, Dec 6, 2016. For more info go to https://www.usenix.org/conference/sesa16 (I'm particularly looking forward to Nicole's opening keynote.)
View ArticleStealing the Best Ideas from DevOps
Christine Hogan and I will be co-presenting a talk at Usenix LISA '16 entitled "Stealing the Best Ideas from DevOps: A Guide for Sysadmins without Developers". Full details are on the LISA website. The...
View ArticleTPOSANA on Amazon Lightning Deals today only!
Upgrade to the new edition! Amazon is having a time-limited sale today that includes the new edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration. This is a good way to get the new edition at a...
View ArticleSolaris being canned.
"Solaris being canned, at least 50% of teams to be RIF'd in short term. Hardware teams being told to cease development. There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4. Orders coming straight...
View ArticleWhat I learned at LISA '16
Congrats to the LISA organizing committee for another successful conference! The Usenix LISA conference was in Boston this year, and ran Sunday to Friday as usual. This was the 30th conference. What I...
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Gall bladder Removal
Today I say goodbye to my gall bladder. I'll miss you, little guy. I scheduled this blog post to appear around the time I should be coming out of surgery. Recovery should be pretty fast (a few days)....
View ArticleInfoQ's interview with the co-authors of TPOSANA 3rd edition
Ben Linders interviewed Tom, Christine and Strata about the 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration: See what's new in the 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network...
View ArticleNotes on implementing flags for flag flips
Someone recently asked me how the flags in "flag flips" are implemented in actual software. There are a couple different techniques that I've seen. Command-line flags: Normal command line flags. To...
View ArticleTom speaking at the new LOPSA-NJ Montclair Meetup
I'll be the speaker at LOPSA-NJ/Montclair in February. Hope to see you there! The February meeting will be held at Montclair State University. Topic: Stealing the Best Ideas from DevOps: A Guide for...
View ArticleAre You Load Balancing Wrong?
I write a thrice-yearly column in acmqueue Magazine. The Dec 20 issue has my newest entry, "Are You Load Balancing Wrong?" You can read it at this URL: http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3028689...
View ArticleNYCDevOps meetup is re-starting!
Hey NYC-area folks! The NYC DevOps meetup is springing back to life! Our next meeting will be Tuesday, January 17, 2017 from 6pm-7:30pm. The meeting is at the Stack Overflow NYC headquarters near the...
View ArticleHow Stack Overflow plans to survive the next DNS attack
My coworker did a bang-up job on this blog post. It explains a lot about how DNS works, how the Dyn DDOS attack worked (we missed it because we don't use Dyn), and the changes we made so that we'll...
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