Sysadmin

Ok, it’s actually an article about 10 Mental Blocks to Creative Thinking but isn’t creative thinking a huge part of being a kick-ass sysadmin? Here’s what I thought of when I read each point, but I highly recommend that you read the whole article and look for ways it applies to you.

In terms of what mindset you should be in:

1. There is almost always more than one right answer.
2. Don’t be so rigid with your logic that you become blind to other possibilities.
3. Always question everything – “why” or “why not”.
4. Always ask “what if” and explore ideas even if they don’t seem feasible on the surface.
5. Make time to play. You’ll be amazed at what problems you solve when you’re not at your desk.
6. Never say “That’s not part of my job” and explore and learn about as much as you can.
7. Try to think about things differently than everyone else at the table is.
8. There is no black and white, only gray, and that’s ok.
9. It’s ok to be wrong and you will be. It’s ok to make mistakes and you will. Learn from it.
10. If you think you can’t do it, then you can’t. You won’t really know unless you try.

Looking for Open Source options for your Enterprise? A great resource is the Enterprise Open Source Directory where you can search Open Source software ratings, read case studies, look at what specific industries are doing, find blogs and forums and much more.

Some quick examples are things like Apache case studies or a summary of Firefox’s status. Definitely a great place to look at before committing to a closed source solution not to mention a great starting point for when you are first looking for software to use in the enterprise. And if you’re one of those that says Open Source isn’t for the enterprise, well, then you can read the case studies and edukate yo’self. A little something for everyone…

Using madwifi to run a PCMCI Wifi card on Linux is a mad easy. After adding a atrpms.repo definition to yum:

[ atrpms]
name=Fedora Core $releasever – $basearch – ATrpms
baseurl=http://dl.atrpms.net/f$releasever-$basearch/atrpms/stable
gpgkey=http://ATrpms.net/RPM-GPG-KEY.atrpms
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
includepkgs=madwifi madwifi-kmdl* madwifi-hal-kmdl*

Then one command:

sudo yum install madwifi madwifi-fmdl-2.6.22.1-41.fc7

Plug the card in and you’re done. WPA worked and everything. Sweet!

I recently bought a used IBM ThinkPad T40 and put Linux on it (Fedora, specifically). It’s the first Linux laptop I’ve had and so the first trackpad I have had to deal with outside of a Mac. I hate trackpad clicks as I find I accidentally click all sorts of things when that is enabled. If I want to click the button is right there, really, what’s the point? Anyway, to disable that annoyance edit xorg.conf and add this line to the Synaptics section:

Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

Then restart X. YMMV if your trackpad isn’t Synaptics based. You can look in /proc/bus/input/devices to find out.

Side note, all hardware on this laptop worked right from the install for both Fedora and Ubuntu.

NAME
       zgrep - search possibly compressed files for a regular expression
SYNOPSIS
       zgrep [ grep_options ] [ -e ] pattern filename...
DESCRIPTION
       Zgrep  invokes grep on compressed or gzipped files.  All options speci-
       fied are passed directly to grep.  If no file is  specified,  then  the
       standard input is decompressed if necessary and fed to grep.  Otherwise
       the given files are uncompressed if necessary and fed to grep.
  

Why didn’t I find this a long time ago? Makes searching through compressed web logs a piece of cake!

I’m not big on closed source software but Apple wins me over every time. I just put some order to 5000+ photos taken over the last 5 years in about 45 minutes with the latest iPhoto using “Events”. Worth every penny that I paid for iLife ‘08 and I haven’t even tried any other new features yet.