Wandering Thoughts archives

2008-12-21:	Part of why managing firewalls is hard The role of superstition and folklore in system administration
2008-12-09:	How Amanda uses what restore program to use, a correction
2008-12-06:	On line endings and honesty
2008-11-21:	Limiting how much load Exim puts on your system
2008-11-19:	A growing realization about `tcpdump` and reading IP traffic
2008-11-08:	Thinking about how your security domains relate to each other
2008-11-05:	How many root passwords should you have?
2008-11-04:	Mistakes editors can make that disqualify them as sysadmin editors
2008-11-03:	Why `vi` has become my sysadmin's editor
2008-10-28:	One reason why people buy Ethernet taps
2008-10-26:	Why RAID-1 is the right choice for our new fileservers
2008-10-25:	How we worked out the partition sizes for our SAN
2008-10-22:	How Amanda knows what restore program to use
2008-10-09:	We've lost the password battle
2008-09-25:	Why qmail is no longer a suitable Internet MTA
2008-09-21:	Why I wind up writing real parsers for my sysadmin tools
2008-09-17:	How to securely manipulate user files
2008-09-11:	Why I have the same shell dotfiles everywhere
2008-09-06:	Why negative DNS caching is necessary
2008-08-31:	There is a balance between optimism and paranoia for compromised machines
2008-08-27:	How I think about how important security updates are
2008-08-25:	Fixing low command error distances The concept of error distance in sysadmin commands
2008-08-12:	The first principle of analyzing compromised machines
2008-08-03:	A performance gotcha with `syslogd`
2008-07-31:	A crude system verification method
2008-07-20:	Thinking about uses for (system) activity tracers
2008-07-11:	The case of the mysteriously failing connections
2008-07-06:	A small drawback to Wietse Venema's TCP Wrappers
2008-07-03:	Why system administrators like interpreted languages
2008-06-20:	Accidental bittorrent on our networks
2008-06-19:	A thought about filesystem snapshots
2008-06-16:	Why people persist in sending files by email
2008-06-02:	Why package systems are important
2008-05-25:	The risks of forcing frequent password changes
2008-05-23:	Frequent password changes as security mythology
2008-05-11:	Another problem with doing your own sysadmin automation
2008-05-05:	The costs of doing your own system administration automation
2008-05-03:	Why people don't automate sysadmin stuff
2008-05-02:	Automation changes as systems grow
2008-04-17:	The limits of isolated interfaces
2008-04-16:	The appeal of GNU tools
2008-04-15:	Management interfaces as isolated interfaces
2008-04-07:	Get statistics
2008-03-31:	Keeping secrets as a system administrator
2008-03-29:	Tradeoffs in where you store volume management metadata
2008-03-25:	The easy way to keep a week's worth of something
2008-03-06:	The difference between operations and system administration
2008-03-05:	How we make Exim discard bounces of spam
2008-03-03:	How not to set up your DNS (part 18)
2008-02-26:	Something that I do not understand
2008-02-25:	The best way to shroud IP addresses
2008-02-21:	Wireless, machine rooms, and the Asus Eee PC
2008-02-20:	How our automounter replacement works
2008-02-15:	A weird routing mystery
2008-02-05:	Prewiring experimental racks
2008-01-31:	The sysadmin's life (again)
2008-01-27:	Classic crontab syntax mistakes
2008-01-25:	A modest suggestion about test accounts
2008-01-17:	Lab notebooks are not changelogs
2008-01-16:	Why sysadmins should keep a lab notebook
2008-01-11:	The importance of killing processes with the right signal
2008-01-01:	An unpleasant thing about system administration

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