Linux Mag's Top 10 Sys Admin Articles of 2008

With 2008 coming to an end, everyone is starting to put out their "Top" lists. I saw the announcement today in my Inbox that Linux Magazine posted its Top 10 Sys Admin Articles of 2008. Unfortuantely, the links to articles requires registration, but it's free. The two articles on ZFS interest me the most, and I want to refresh myself on the "port knocking" article. I forget where I've heard about port knocking before. I'm pretty sure it was a couple years ago though.

It also made me realize I miss reading physical magazines over online copies. Then again, I rarely read the ones I get in the mail now. It's amazing how technology changes things.

On a totally unrelated note, I just wanted to share a good laugh about Matt Simmons' comment on a blog post about having multiple superusers on the VMware ESX server.

"Once, many many moons ago, probably near the peak of my danger curve, I got tired of su’ing all the time, so I just changed my uid to 0 in the passwd file. That was fun."

I can't explain why it struck me as funny as it did, but that was probably the funniest thing I've read today.

"find" and "Permission denied"

I was trying to run "find" on a directory, looking for a perl script. Because of which user I was running it as, I was getting a bunch of "Permission denied" errors.

I thought I could just tack on "| grep -v "Permission denied" at the end of my command, but no luck. I fruitlessly checked to see if there would be something in the find man page as well.

I came across this site: http://www.hypexr.org/linux_find_help.php

The correct answer to what I was trying to accomplish was

$ find / -name foo.bar -print 2>/dev/null

What's your blog's personality?

I came across this blog post (a post about a post about a site) that discusses a beta online tool, Typealyzer, that tries to determine your blog's personality. Mine came out to be "ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers."

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir [sic] own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

Doesn't sound too flattering, but I guess it could be worse. What personality is your blog?

Should you learn vi?

There are so many arguments about which editor to use. Some people are quite passionate about their editor of choice. I came across this blog post today through Planet SysAdmin discussing why one person uses vi for system administration.

http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/WhyViForSysadmins

It pretty much sums up why it was stronly suggested to me to use vi at the beginning of my career. At that time, I only knew pico and a few commands in emacs; although now, I couldn't tell you how to edit a file in either. Over the years I've noticed the author's point is true. Almost any unix type system you encounter, it will have at least vi installed. It's definitely handy to have a basic proficiency with vi if you do any command line *NIX administration.

So, while you get your caffeine fix at work, this could come in handy as well.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/mugs/7bbe/

Who would think adding a monitor would be so hard?

I was asked today if I'd like an LCD Monitor. I was thinking, "Why not? I could extend my laptop's desktop in Windows XP to it." It's not a bad monitor either; a NEC MultiSync LCD 1970NX. Granted, it doesn't have a flashy widescreen or anything spectacular about it.

I plugged it in to my power strip and VGA port on my Lenovo T61p, and turned it on. Screen black. Oh yeah, need to change my display output settings with a couple toggles of Fn-F7. Still screen black. Huh. Looked at the Display Properties, and XP sees the other monitor and the monitor appears to get a signal. What gives?

I go to NEC's website and see there are drivers for Windows XP. Maybe Plug-and-Play doesn't work? Strange, but okay. Installed the drivers, the LCD 1970NX is detected, etc. Screen black. OK, reboot? Screen black. Went into the menu for the monitor and set it back to factory defaults. Screen still black.

OK, so I go back into Display Properties. Try to make it my default monitor. No dice. Cycle through the display out settings (Fn-F7) so that it only uses the video out. Denied. Change the resolution to something lower, like 800x600 and 16bit color. Still no video. Muck with the screen refresh rate, and change from 60 to 75 Hertz. Starting to lose my patience.

Quick search in Google doesn't yield any known issues, so I cave and ask our local desktop guy. He starts to go through the same steps I've outlined above, without any more success than I do. Then he notices something. My monitor is plugged into the VGA port on my laptop, instead of the VGA port on my port replicator/dock. Apparently, the VGA port on my laptop won't work when it's plugged into my dock, and I have to use the VGA port on it. Makes sense, but I wish XP didn't "detect" the monitor plugged in directly to the laptop, else I would have probably determined that I have to plug the monitor into the dock a lot quicker.

Adding FeedBurner support

Out of curiousity of what it actually does and what additional benefits it provides, I've set up "The Bungling Sys Admin" in FeedBurner. I haven't figured out why people use this service, but curiosity killed the cat. Hopefully it won't "break" my blog. Feel free to comment about your experiences with FeedBurner, why you use it or don't use it, and if it made anything go awry with this blog.