Passed my Red Hat 6 exam yesterday. Woo hoo!
Category Archives: Technology
All things tech
How to extend a filesystem in linux using LVM…
I know this is old hat for most people in the *nix world, but I got asked to do a write up for this, so I figured I might as well post it here. Enjoy
Here’s a break down.
Assumptions.: In this tutorial, we’ve added space to a virtual disk in VMWare VCenter. This Continue reading How to extend a filesystem in linux using LVM…
Technical Info for Technical Recruiters
EDIT:Originally posted 2012, updated for 2016…
I am a mid-to-advanced-career techie. I have been working in, on, around, near, over, under, and through computers and networks for literally as long as I can remember. I got my first computer at 10, now almost 30 years ago, and was the local geek for years. I’ve been paid to work on computers for nearly 25 years. I realize that doesn’t make me an expert per se, but it means I have a bit of insight into the tech world. Sure, there may be more knowledgeable people for this post, I concur, but it seems nobody else has taken the time to set it to text.
So, here goes. TECHNICAL RECRUITERS: you could learn a lot by paying attention here.
A technical job is going to be able to be broken down into a few categories. Many of these overlap, and I understand it gets confusing, but here’s a few quick breakdowns:
Job types in tech fields:
Administration world… (Key words: Microsoft Windows, Linux, Unix, HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Sun, Active Directory, Virtualization, OpenStack , AWS, VMWare, LDAP, Apache, IIS, LAMP… ) Continue reading Technical Info for Technical Recruiters
How to configure mrepo to mirror Red Hat’s repositories for multiple versions and architectures!
Have you ever needed/wanted to set up a single Red Hat Enterprise Linux server to sync all you servers to for package updates? 32 and 64 bit machines pointing to the same server? Different distros on the same server? Here’s how…
This tutorial is for setting up mrepo only. It’s the first part of setting up a Spacewalk instance to mirror RHN. If you’ve already completed this, go on to Part Two…(coming soon)
Part One: Setting up a mrepo server to mirror RHN’s Satellite repositories.
Spacewalk as a viable replacement for Satellite
[Edit- mrepo tutorial has been posted. See here…]
Okay, a Primer, first.
Spacewalk is an open-sourced software suite for maintaining a number of Red Hat based servers. The Commercial version is Red Hat’s Satellite Server. SatServer has a few more bells and whistles, and the added benefit of support from the big Red Hat themselves, but also costs about $50,000 a copy. (Okay, I realize that number is off, depending on your situation, but my point remains. It’s expensive.)
What does it do? A lot, actually. You can use it for building new servers, and maintaining existing Continue reading Spacewalk as a viable replacement for Satellite
Oh the joys of storage work in a network you’ve never actually seen.
Bad idea: SAN storage on iscsi that mounts after fstab.
Worse idea: labeling them with /dev/sdX tags so they look like normal disks.
Worser idea: telling someone you’re adding disks to the raid array when you’re actually not- you’re adding it to a SAN the engineer still doesn’t know exists.
Mind numbingly worst idea: not having start/stop scripts on your Oracle RAC server because the whole “unable to mount the iscsi” drives configuration problem. Even with that whole mount/unmount problem- you SHOULD STILL HAVE A STOP SCRIPT so you don’t reboot a server with a live DB running.
On the need for structure in a budding Enterprise environment…
I am not an “organized” person. I like to go with the flow, be spontaneous, and shoot from the hip. I fully acknowledge that is not always the best way to be in a profession such as computing, but it is what it is. In my professional capacity, I am a proponent of organization on a much larger scale than I could ever do in my personal life. I think Christy is to blame for that. 🙂
At any rate, I started my new job in May, and was thrust into a position where there are 6 datacenter-ish locations (5 DC’s and HQ has a server room with a fair number of live boxes)… still a far cry from the 3,000 Linux boxes we had at Fidelity. Continue reading On the need for structure in a budding Enterprise environment…
New cars for the Kling Clan…
Well, it’s that time again…every 4-6 years our cars come due for relatively annoying issues, and high mileage, and it comes time to think about replacing them.
Christy had a 2007 Saturn Vue, little over 4 years old and starting to show wear. It was at around 80K, too. Continue reading New cars for the Kling Clan…
iPad Facebook app exists…
…if you know where to look.
Apparently you can enable the iPhone facebook app to iPad mode just by adjusting a setting in the app itself. Just change the UIDeviceFamily setting from 1 to 2, and voila, instant FB in the native format. The offical release can’t be more than a few days away, but @AeroEchelon sent along the fix via twitter with a bit of a headstart. Enjoy!
Lessons learned, re: EMC Powerpath
Apparently, multipathing with Powerpath requires a restart and module reload to add luns to an existing system. That also involves unmounting live filesystems to do so. That means an outage. Production does not like outages, and surprisingly enough, neither dev nor QA like outages either. Continue reading Lessons learned, re: EMC Powerpath