Tag: sysadmin

  • Fun with ANALYZE TABLE

    MySQL has been naughty for me lately. First, I ran into a neat little issue on FreshBooks’ production servers last week involving the table cache and an O(n) algorithm for selecting a table to close. I wrote up a little explanation over on the FreshBooks blog that you might find interesting if you find any […]

  • FreshBooks is hiring a sysadmin!

    I’m not sure that I’ve got a lot of Toronto-local intermediate-level sysadmins reading here, but just in case, I’ve just posted a job posting for an Intermediate Linux System Administrator (SAGE level III) to our careers site. The details are all at the link, but basically we’re at the point where there’s enough to do […]

  • Exploiting NIC firmware

    From Ben Laurie: Bypass the firewall by bypassing everything but the PCI bus.

  • Dear lazyweb: Hyperic, Zenoss?

    Sysadmins on the lazyweb: I’ve used Nagios for years, accompanied by either a homebrew trending/graphing package or Munin. Recently I’ve had a few people draw my attention to Hyperic, and from there I’ve been looking at Zenoss Core as well. If any of you have experience with Hyperic or Zenoss, and especially if you’ve left […]

  • <3 Linode.

    lish is the ssh-based lights-out admin console for a Linode virtual server. [rich@dallas64 lish]# cake Devil’s Food Cake – tasaro’s office desktop INGREDIENTS: * 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa * 1 1/4 tsp baking soda * 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar * 1 teaspoon salt * 1 1/4 cups milk, scalded * 2/3 cup shortening * […]

  • Printer fun

    I spent much of the afternoon yesterday on the phone with Dell, debugging a confused printer. We moved the printer across the room, and following that it wouldn’t print; it’d just sit there at “Printing…”, and the client print progress thing would stay at 0%… until you disconnected the network cable. Then it’d print whatever […]

  • No more Unix mail at Dreamhost

    I left DreamHost just in time: We’re no longer allowing (new) FTP/SHELL users to have an email address associated with them. […] Fortunately, this change should be more or less invisible to everybody! The only thing lost is the ability to see and manipulate your mail files via FTP/Shell… (and even that is only for […]

  • I’m on Linode now!

    After my post about my Dreamhost experiences, I finally decided that enough was enough and signed up for a Linode. I should’ve done this ages ago. For $20/mo, I get a virtual server (using Xen, which is conceptually like VMware if you’ve heard of one but not the other) with 360MB of RAM, 10GB of […]