Wandering Thoughts archives

2013-12-25:	Procedures are not documentation
2013-12-17:	You probably don't want to use Make to build your generated files
2013-12-08:	Sometimes the right thing to do is to stop (and even to give up)
2013-12-05:	Some thoughts on a body of knowledge for system administration
2013-12-04:	`sudo` is not an auditing mechanism
2013-11-30:	The case of the disappearing ESATA disk
2013-11-25:	Track your disk failures
2013-11-15:	Professional knowledge, certification, and regulation
2013-11-13:	The cost of expensive hardware and the benefit of hindsight
2013-11-10:	Are those chassis fans actually still spinning? My views on network booting as an alternative to system disks
2013-11-06:	Why you might not want to use SSDs as system disks just yet
2013-11-03:	Why we're switching to SSDs for system disks
2013-10-31:	Our likely future backend and fileserver hardware
2013-10-30:	An open question: part uniformity versus unit cost
2013-10-21:	Thinking about how I want to test disk IO on an iSCSI backend
2013-10-20:	Thoughts inspired by the abstract idea of Docker-like things
2013-09-30:	Centralizing syslogs as an easy way to improve your environment
2013-09-28:	Why I put configuration management systems over packaging systems
2013-09-27:	The long term future of any particular configuration management system
2013-09-26:	Trying to explain my harshness on configuration management tools
2013-09-18:	Reconsidering external disk enclosures versus disk servers
2013-09-07:	Why wiring things up physically instead of virtually is better for us
2013-09-06:	Making switch configuration changes is not as easy as it looks
2013-09-05:	The physical versus the virtual approach to network wiring
2013-08-29:	A new piece of my environment: clearing the X selection
2013-08-19:	My views on various bits of disk drive technology today
2013-08-16:	Funding and the size of hardware you want to buy
2013-08-08:	How to accidentally reboot a server
2013-07-27:	The easy path versus the virtuous path (in system setup)
2013-07-24:	Why vendor prices are important things to have
2013-07-22:	External disk enclosures versus disk servers
2013-07-07:	Sometimes the right thing to do is nothing (at least right then) A mistake to avoid with summer interns
2013-06-30:	Our pragmatic approach to updating machines to match our baseline
2013-06-22:	Automatedly overwriting changed files is not a feature
2013-06-20:	The question of whether to rewrite an old but working service
2013-06-19:	Our approach to configuration management
2013-06-18:	What's in the way of us using automated configuration management
2013-06-17:	My job versus my career: some thoughts
2013-05-20:	A serious potential danger with Exim host lists in ACLs
2013-05-18:	A little habit of our documentation: how we write logins
2013-05-10:	Disk IO is what shatters the VM illusion for me right now
2013-05-03:	Virtual disks should be treated as 4k 'Advanced Format' drives
2013-04-29:	My practical problem with preconfigured virtual machine templates
2013-04-24:	Two mistakes I made with VMs today
2013-04-23:	Goodbye, djb dnscache
2013-04-21:	RCS should not be your first choice for version control
2013-04-05:	Authoritative, non-recursive DNS servers now need ratelimiting
2013-03-31:	Why we'll continue to have local compute servers in the future Can we really use the cloud?
2013-03-10:	The easy way to wind up with multiple subnets on a single (V)LAN segment
2013-03-06:	How we make Exim cut off bounce loops
2013-03-04:	Why you should never use '`/bin/sh -c ...`' in configuration files
2013-03-02:	The mythology of spending money on things, or not doing so
2013-02-16:	Finding out what TLS/SSL cryptography people actually get with your servers
2013-02-11:	Thinking about how I use email
2013-02-09:	Solve your command parsing problems by using scripts
2013-01-22:	Disaster recovery preparation is not the same as a DR plan
2013-01-20:	Real disaster recovery plans require preallocated resources
2013-01-18:	SLAs, downtime, and planning

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By month for 2013: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec; before 2013; after 2013.