Remembering Evi Nemeth: The woman that saved "sudo"
Technology website The Register called it. With the search called off, we must presume that Evi Nemeth is no longer with us. Their obit, "Godmother of Unix admins Evi Nemeth presumed lost at sea",...
View ArticleI'm giving away 2 free admissions to PuppetConf 2013!
The fine folks at PuppetLabs have given me two tickets to give away! Puppet Labs wants to send two of my readers to PuppetConf this year in San Francisco (happening August 22 - 23rd). The two lucky...
View ArticlePuppetConf ticket contest: Winners
If your last name is "Cole" or "Joy" you should have email waiting for you with some good news. Congrats! To everyone else that entered, thanks for entering. Please consider going to the conference....
View ArticleTom speaking at SpiceWorld conference!
Just announced on the SpiceWorks website! SpiceWorld is a conference held by the fine people at SpiceWorks. Register here: http://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/2013/austin/register/
View ArticleWas the search for Evi botched?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south-pacific/8972169/Search-for-missing-yacht-botched
View ArticleThe "They know it's a problem"-Syndrome
As a system administrator you hate to see it happen: A user has a problem. They don't report it to you (enter a bug report, file a ticket). They whine to their friends, or suffer in silence. Months...
View ArticleTPOSANA BugHunt Announced!
"The Practice of System and Network Administration" (TPOSANA) is now 7 years old (with some chapters virtually unmodified since the first edition, 12 years ago). We are preparing to update the book and...
View ArticleSo your management fails at IT, huh?
Recently on a mailing list sysadmins were describing horrible management they've experienced. Here is my reply: First, I want to say that my heart goes out to all of you describing terrible working...
View ArticleUnix/Linux "bash" shell users:
Do not do this at home: https://gist.github.com/solidsnack/4744661 That's just wrong.
View ArticleUsenix LISA training schedule published
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13 The training this year has a lot of advanced topics that will bring a smile from anyone working in a DevOps environment. Tutorials on Jenkins,...
View ArticleIntroducing my new tutorial: Evil Genius 101
Topics include: Helping your coworkers understand and agree to your awesome ideas Convincing your manager about anything (really!) Turning the most stubborn user into your biggest fan Getting others to...
View ArticlePuppet Camp DC, Tue, Nov 5, 2013 (free admission!)
If you are sad you can't attend PuppetConf 2013 this week, start planning for Puppet Camp DC. It is co-located with the Usenix LISA conference, which is Nov 6-9, 2013 in Washington D.C. Puppet Camp DC...
View ArticleEvi Nemeth's life-raft spotted?
The search for Evi Nemeth and the others onboard the Nina has been restarted. The the crowd-sourced search of 56,000 satellite pictures appeared to find an orange/yellow object to the west of Norfolk...
View ArticleSysadmins/Devops needed for study
I met Jeevitha Mahendiran at Usenix LISA last year. She is studying sysadmins and what we do. She writes: I'm Jeevitha Mahendiran, Graduate Student/Research Assistant Faculty of Computer Science,...
View ArticleLOPSA NJ Chapter meeting: IBM Blue Gene /P, Thu, Sept 5, 2013
It isn't on the website yet, but the September meeting will have a special guest: Title: Anatomy of a Supercomputer: The architecture of the IBM Blue Gene /P. IBM refers to their Blue Gene family of...
View ArticleUsenix LISA "Build A Cloud Day", Fri, Nov 8, 2013 in DC (no charge!)
Considering all the security issues raised this year, isn't it time you built a private cloud? Build a Cloud Day will be dedicated to teaching users how to build and manage a cloud computing...
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Velocity NYC: Stack Exchange will be presenting!
Hey all my NYC peeps! Velocity comes to NYC in October. That's just a few weeks away! My awesome coworkers Steven, Nick, and George will be giving a talk about how ServerFault.com/StackOverflow.com...
View ArticleLaTeX dvipdf tip: -dFirstPage/-dLastPage doesn't work
Spoiler alert: it works with Ghostscript 9.09 but not Ghostscript 9.06. I'm writing this mostly to vent. Here's the story. Most of my books are written using the LaTeX formatting system. The latex...
View ArticleThe team I'm on at Stack Exchange is hiring
Here's the job advert. We're looking for someone who will be heavy on the developer side of SRE. If you are interested in OpenTSDB, you'll be very interested in this position. Stack Exchange is the...
View ArticleLOPSA NYC: Etsy: Feature Flagging your Infrastructure for Fun and Profit
The first part of the meeting will be about Etsy's deployment infrastructure. The second half of the meeting will be a chance to discuss the talk, brain storm future topic ideas, and hopefully get more...
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