There are two versions of this story. In one version I'd start by notingthat RHEL never really caught on here because it wasn't enough better than Ubuntu LTS to be mostly worththe hassle, mention our iSCSI backends as theexception, and then explain that as part of turning over that entireinfrastructure we decided that we might as well run Ubuntu LTS on thebackends instead of RHEL. This is somewhat more sensible than it mightlook; our backends are essentially appliances that we almost neverupdate, we

One of the modern system administration practices is fully automated OSinstalls; practically everyone supports it and some OSes even considerit their primary deployment method. I am a lonely holdout, at least formoderate sized environments such as ours where machine (re)installs arenot an everyday activity. I have two reasons for this.

The first reason is a pragmatic one. As far as I can tell, it's stillgenerally a fair amount of work to put together a reliable, fullyfunctional auto-install environment that

I have to admit straight off the bat that this is mostly an uninformedprejudice. I have not actually run RHEL 6 machines (our few RHELmachines are RHEL 5); all that I've ever done with it is install it acouple of times to test some things. So part of this is based on generalknowledge of what it has and part of this is based on those installexperiences.

My impression of the install experience was not positive. Although Idon't remember details, it struck me

A couple of days ago, the SMTP logs on one of my machines lit up witha whole bunch of attempted inbound connections from all over theworld. The first striking thing about these connection attempts isthat they all seemed to be from people's home machines (what wouldonce have been called 'dialups' but now uses cable modems, DSL, andvarious other technologies). Many of these machines were on the PBL and a couple that I just checked noware currently on the CBL.

The second striking

Suppose, hypothetically, that you have a need to both expose somehosts to incoming SSH traffic from the Internet and to allow rootaccess (either direct or through automated means like authorizedkey permissions) to them over SSH. However, you certainly don'tneed both at once; you'll never be doing root access from theInternet. Wouldn't it be nice if you could have some sshd settingsthat varied based on where the connection was coming from?

Well, you can. Modern versions of OpenSSH

I have a conflicted relationship with NetworkManager that gives merather divided opinions of it. The short version is that sometimes it'sgood and other times it's terrible, depending mostly on what sort ofmachine you're using it on (by choice or otherwise).

Where NetworkManager is good is on graphical machines with relativelysimple network configurations, especially if they move betweennetworks. This is typical for 'plug it into the network and do DHCP'desktops and for laptops in general. In most distributions,

I've previously mentioned in passing that Isimply can't use Python 3 on some platforms because it's not there (orperhaps it's there only in an old and lacking version). As reported by Twirrim , in some places the popularanswer to this issue is to say that I should just compile my own localversion of Python 3 by hand (perhaps in a virtualenv). At this pointmost of the sysadmins in the audience are starting to get out of theirchairs, but hold

Once upon a time, the front page of your blog was how people read andfollowed it. This drove a great many features of the standard blog frontpage, things like the tropism towards showing full entries and pagednavigation that let you go back to the previous N entries and so on.However, that was a very long time ago and things are almost certainlymuch different today.

I'm sure that some people still read blogs they follow through the frontpage (I'll admit that I do that

Some people are already laughing at the title of this entry but really,hear me out. Both I individually and where I work collectively havegenerally had really good luck with hardware. For the most part thingsjust haven't broken and as a result we run both servers and hard driveswell beyond what people consider their normal sane lifetimes. Generallyeverything has kept going and going and going, which is very convenientfor a place that has traditionally had essentially no hardware budget .

Our current fileservers , their iSCSIbackends,