From the category archives:

Systems Administration

DevOps is a good cause, but what about OpsOps?

March 9, 2010

A few recent blog posts have attempted to explain the Devops bloody revolution movement. I’m overdue to post one of my own. Lest we get carried away, let’s not just focus on the Developer < -> Systems Administrator axis. As Graham expounded on Friday night (and I paraphrase, for the Build Doctor [...]

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London DevOps Meetup

February 11, 2010

There’s some fantastic DevOps talent in London.  It’s been a little fragmented, mind you. That stops on February 24th.
Come to the pub and talk about delivering great software without status, remit or pissing matches.   If you can’t make it, there’s always the #ldndevops Twitter hashtag, and the London Devops blog aggregator (see the link [...]

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Giternal Debian package

January 12, 2010
incorrect git pavement commands

Giternal is a handy tool for managing git submodules. Give it a YAML file of git repositories, and it’ll ensure that the repos are all checked out. I’d use it to bootstrap all of the Puppet modules that I need, except for one fact:
It’s a rubygem. Happy to use them, but I don’t [...]

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Rubygems on Ubuntu (with Puppet if you like)

December 10, 2009
fighting cats

Debian packages and Rubygems: they get on like two angry cats in a sack. This post explains how you get Rubygems and Dpkg to play nicely on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.
What’s the issue? The Debian Packaging System (DPKG) is pretty good as packaging systems go. It’s had dependency support baked in for years, [...]

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Scalecamp

December 4, 2009

I’m at ScaleCamp today. Will hopefully get some blog posts done today, and will be tweeting.

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Drunken Build Monkeys, and Agile Systems Administration

November 14, 2009

LRUG kindly let me do a talk on Systems Administration on Wednesday night. It had a working title of Drunken Build Monkey (my homage to Jackie Chan), but ended up with a far more serious title.
John Arundel opened the event (and let me steal his MacBook for my Keynote presentation). Thanks to [...]

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A solution to broken Gems?

June 25, 2009

RubyGems have been exceptionally successful as a way for Ruby developers to share code. We generally think that sharing code is a good thing. Certainly, the Rails community can write projects exceptionally quickly; thanks, in part to RubyGems.

My beef has been that RubyGems doesn’t play nice with operating systems. We have standards for where things [...]

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Guest Post: Test First in Operations

May 7, 2009
Thumbnail image for Guest Post: Test First in Operations

Today’s post is by Matthias Marschall of the fantastic Agile Web Operations blog. Matthias is the CTO of Autoplenum, when he’s not blogging.
Monitoring a server is very similar to continuously building and testing code.

In development, you write tested code, commit it to version control and the CI server tries to build and deploy [...]

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Don’t be disco, use sudo

April 2, 2009

Interesting comment from Ken Mayer on my post about root passwords:
No one should ever use “root” for anything except single-user mode emergencies and initial configuration. Make it a long string of random characters and store it in a safe or encrypted on a secure hard drive. Make it unique for every box. Then forget about [...]

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How to choose a root password that you’ll remember

March 31, 2009

Root passwords and Administrator passwords: Too simple, and you expose the security of the whole machine. Too complex and (if you’re like me) you forget them. With the number of passwords we all need to retain now, what do you do?
A greybeard Unix admin once let me in on the answer to that question, and [...]

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