Wandering Thoughts archives

2015-12-31:	How I've wound up taking my notes
2015-12-29:	Take notes when (and as) you do things and keep them
2015-12-21:	Some opinions on how package systems should allow you to pin versions
2015-12-18:	A fun tale of network troubleshooting involving VLANs and MACs
2015-11-30:	A new piece of my environment: `xcape`, an X modifier key modifier
2015-11-27:	Documentation should explain why things are security issues, at least briefly
2015-11-12:	Don't have support registrations in the name of a specific sysadmin
2015-11-10:	Why I spent a lot of time agonizing over an error message recently
2015-11-09:	What sysadmins want out of logging means that it can't be too simple
2015-11-02:	Status reporting commands should have script-oriented output too
2015-10-31:	In practice, anything involving the JVM is often a heavyweight thing
2015-10-23:	Perhaps it's a good idea to reboot everything periodically
2015-10-20:	Why I never tell people how I voted
2015-10-14:	OS installers should be easy to open up and modify
2015-10-11:	Bad news about how we detect and recover from NFS server problems
2015-10-09:	Our low-rent approach to verifying that NFS mounts are there
2015-10-03:	There are two approaches to disaster recovery plans
2015-09-28:	On not having people split their time between different bosses
2015-09-25:	Do we want to continue using a SAN in our future fileserver design?
2015-09-08:	How we disable accounts here (and why)
2015-09-07:	Why we wind up deleting user accounts
2015-09-05:	Why we aren't tempted to use ACLs on our Unix machines
2015-09-02:	Thinking about the different models of supplying computing
2015-08-26:	Why I wind up writing my own (sysadmin) tools
2015-08-25:	One view on practical blockers for IPv6 adoption
2015-08-06:	Two factor authentication and emergency access to systems
2015-08-05:	What I want out of two factor authentication for my own use
2015-07-26:	Why I increasingly think we're unlikely to ever use Docker
2015-07-25:	Everything that does TLS should log the SSL parameters used
2015-07-14:	Don't support shortened versions of your domain names in email addresses
2015-07-10:	What SSH keys in your .ssh/config will be offered to servers
2015-07-09:	When SSH needs you to decrypt your keys
2015-07-05:	Sysadmin use of email is often necessarily more or less interrupt driven
2015-06-09:	How I use virtual screens in my desktop environment
2015-06-06:	The security danger of exploitable bugs in file format libraries
2015-06-01:	The problem with 'what is your data worth?'
2015-05-30:	What I'm doing in reaction to Logjam (for HTTPS, SSH, and IKE)
2015-05-10:	Our mail submission system winds up handling two sorts of senders
2015-05-09:	What addresses we accept and reject during mail submission
2015-05-08:	Sometimes it's useful to have brute force handy: an amusing IPMI bug
2015-05-04:	Monitoring tools should report timestamps (and what they're monitoring)
2015-05-03:	Sometimes knowing causes does you no good (and sensible uses of time)
2015-04-27:	The fading out of tcpwrappers and its idea
2015-04-23:	Upgrading machines versus reinstalling them
2015-04-20:	I don't think I'm interested in containers
2015-04-12:	One speed limit on your ability to upgrade your systems
2015-03-30:	My preliminary views on `mosh` The 'cattle' model for servers is only a good fit in certain situations
2015-03-29:	SSH connection sharing and erratic networks
2015-03-16:	Solving our authenticated SMTP problem by rethinking it
2015-03-14:	Using an automounter doesn't always help with bad NFS servers
2015-03-13:	The puzzle of packets to your host that your host doesn't respond to
2015-03-09:	I should document my test plans and their results
2015-03-06:	Our brute force solution for port isolation without port isolated switches
2015-03-02:	My view of the difference between 'pets' and 'cattle'
2015-02-28:	Sometimes why we have singleton machines is that failover is hard
2015-02-27:	What limits how fast we can install machines
2015-02-24:	How we do and document machine builds
2015-02-14:	Planning ahead in documentation: kind of a war story
2015-02-09:	'Inbox zero' doesn't seem to work for me but it's still tempting
2015-02-05:	All of our important machines are pets and special snowflakes
2015-02-04:	How our console server setup works
2015-02-03:	Why we've wound up moving away from serial consoles on our machines
2015-01-18:	Limited retention policies for email are user-hostile
2015-01-07:	Forwarding access to only a subset of ssh-agent's identities
2015-01-03:	The effects of our fileserver multi-tenancy
2015-01-02:	Where we have multi-tenancy in our fileserver environment

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