AspiringSysadmin.com

Asus EEE - the perfect Christmas gift

Nickus — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:10:46 +0000

I’ve been looking a lot at the Asus EEE and I’m quite convinced that I will get myself one for Christmas this year. It is really small enough to carry around everywhere and since it is based on x86 you can basically run any operating system you like on it. If you use google a bit you will quickly find people that have tested Ubuntu, OpenBSD, Windows on it. So far I haven’t seen any confirmed case that someone is running Solaris on it but if someone has tried please leave a comment below.

Since it has builtin Ethernet as well as WLAN I think it could be the perfect sysadmin companion in a small server room. There is usually not much space to get a bulky laptop in there but this one could fit almost everywhere.

I read somewhere that this Christmas GPS will be the hot thing but if you are looking for a perfect Christmas gift for a geek then have a look at the Asus EEE.

Basic Security Tips

Nickus — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 19:19:37 +0000

Linuxhaxor has a list of some very basic security tips for Linux but they are mostly applicable to all platforms. They are indeed basic but I’ve seen many places where people do not care about these.

Are You Creating Checklists?

Nickus — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:40:15 +0000

I’m a true believer in checklists for everything. I use the Getting Things Done framework both in my professional and personal life. But I’m not going to talk about that kind of checklists.

Most sysadmins I know use checklists for their daily work, especially if there is critical work to be done. In particular for systems that requires that they work at 4 am in the morning. For most people that is not the most optimal time for creative thinking and a checklist allows you to follow a simple recipe for getting through the maintenance window. By making a checklist you also need to think about your maintenance window beforehand and this allows you to find flaws in your thinking while not working on that critical server. This process tends to reduce downtime as well because you catch flaws in your thinking early and there are less surprises when you do the actual work early in the morning.

My own checklists usually contains commands that I need to run, outputs that needs to be double checked before moving on and so forth. Many times it has been a life saver particularly if something is not going exactly as planned. It is easy to forget a vital thing when you continue you work but the checklist make sure that you actually get your job done. If possible I always try to do a dress rehearsal on a different system (but a very similar system).

informIT has a sample chapter from The Practice of System and Network Administration about checklists. It is well worth a read and if you don’t own the book I simply can’t recommend it too much.

If you have any good tips regarding checklists feel free to put them in the comment section.

Security Guidelines for Solaris 10

Nickus — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 22:50:45 +0000

Glenn Brunnette is announcing that Sun together with Center for Internet Security has published new security guidelines for Solaris 10 11/06 and 08/07. Read the whole story on Glenn’s blog or go directly to the documents.

Read here for more security related material on this blog.

Mac OS X - the perfect sysadmin workstation

Nickus — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:50:53 +0000

If you work as a sysadmin you are most likely using a Windows or *NIX machine as your workstation. I feel sorry for those of you who has to use Windows, *NIX people are slightly better off. However, in my opinion the perfect system administrator workstation is Mac OS X. Why you may ask?
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Virtualization options in Solaris running on Sun hardware

Nickus — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:12:56 +0000

Virtualization has been a hot topic for quite some time. If you are using Solaris and Sun hardware you have had a number of options for many years already and the last few years there has been even more options made available. Today you have four different virtualization alternatives when you want to run Solaris (and I’m not counting running Solaris inside VMware since it only works as a client, not a host). Keep on reading for more information.

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Consistent MySQL backups using ZFS snapshots

Nickus — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 20:08:52 +0000

It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I really like ZFS. Personally I think it is one of the biggest developments in file system design in many many years. One place where I’ve started to use it recently on my own home server is to make instant and consistent backups of my MySQL databases. In this article I will show you how to install MySQL on a ZFS file system and supply you with a script to make consistent snapshots of the databases. This script may not be 100% fit for busy sites but for most smaller places I think it is perfect.

To start of we will install MySQL. Since I’m also a big fan of Blastwave I will use their binary package.
# /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get -i mysql5 ...lots of output...

This will download the MySQL server as well as the client programs and install them into /opt/csw/mysql5. You may want to add this to your PATH.

The next step is to make sure that the databases are stored on a ZFS file system. In the example I will assume you have ZFS pool called data.
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Use pfiles to peek into your application

Nickus — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:27:37 +0000

Have you ever asked yourself what files a specific application is accessing at the moment? If the answer is yes and you are running Solaris then pfiles(1) is the answer.

First you need to find the PID of the application that you are interested in. In this example will we look at syslog.

# ps -ef | grep syslog root 349 1 0 Jul 13 ? 0:00 /usr/sbin/syslogd

The PID is 349. To get a list of the open files you run pfiles like this:

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Sysadmin Related Links

Nickus — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:39:38 +0000

Here are a few sysadmin related links:

There is a new Ruby and sysadmin related book available, Practical Ruby for System Administration. The last few years Ruby has really sailed up as a good alternative to Perl and Python. Personally I must say I prefer Python over Perl but with all the hype around Ruby I started to glimpse at it.
The next FreeBSD release, 7, will contain a couple of OpenSolaris technologies. ZFS and support for sun4v (the T1 CPU) will be available. DTrace won’t make due to some licensing issue. So if you for some reason do not want to run OpenSolaris then FreeBSD may be the right thing for you. OSX will also have DTrace in the next release but they call it Xray and it looks very cool.
Sudo came out with a new version two days ago, 1.6.9. This is the first release in almost two years. I haven’t spent much time with Solaris RBAC and therefore prefer sudo but I’m planning to investigate RBAC a bit more and you will read more about my adventures here.

Clone your ZFS root file system with one easy command

Nickus — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 19:01:24 +0000

In their latest release Nexenta added support for ZFS boot. I also wrote an article about how to clone and boot another ZFS file system. The process is quite simple but it still contains a number of steps.

To make things even easier I decided to write a script to automate the process. This can be very useful just before you are going to install some new packages or do an upgrade. With this script you can simply do this

# ./clone_root.sh mynewroot

and the script will snapshot and clone the ZFS file system and then it will add an entry to the grub menu so that you can boot it easily in case something goes wrong. No more worries before you do a critical operation. Read on for more information.
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