My Wushu Blog

At work I ran a 5 part FreeBSD Administration training course for the Unix team. I enjoyed it a lot, because I really like to share information. It is especially rewarding when it is something I have taken a great interest in, like the FreeBSD Operating System. The design of the course was simple, I did my best to fill in the gap that a Solaris or Linux administrator might have.

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Software As mentioned many times, this is a FreeBSD based environment. Some good sysinfo output below: Operating system release: FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE OS architecture: amd64 Kernel build dir location: /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC Currently booted kernel: /boot/kernel/kernel Currently loaded kernel modules (kldstat(8)): zfs.ko opensolaris.ko Bootloader settings for the Director/Database node: The /boot/loader.conf has the following contents: kern.ipc.semmni=1024 kern.ipc.semmns=2048 kern.ipc.semmnu=1024 All of the storage nodes and the director are running a GENERIC kernel with very few system tweaking.

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I’ve been using Bacula, the open source backup software, for over a year now. Things have been going well, and I would like to dedicate a post or two to the environment I built. Background Over a year ago, I took it upon myself to replace a single Legato Networker server with Bacula. One of our collaborators had decided to ship us (for no reason at all really, I think they were cleaning out their data center) a Sun X4200 AMD server, and two StorageTek/Sun NAS servers.

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A while ago, I posted about how I backup my server with Duplicity to Amazon’s S3 storage. To follow up, here is a little guide I wrote on using Duplicity in the everyday work environment Overview Duplicity is a backup tool that will create compressed and encrypted (uses gnupg) backup archives. It can use a variety of protocols as the target (file, ftp, webdav, imap, ssh/scp, rsync, hsi, s3 and hsi).

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I can be a glutton for punishment for a nearly trivial amount of gain. So lets bring on the two-factor authentication for my personal FreeBSD server. I’ve been using Google’s 2-step verification since Jenny told me about it, along with my android powered phone. What is nice about Google’s Authenticator app is its availability for multiple smartphone platforms: Android version 1.5 or later BlackBerry OS 4.2 - 4.7 iPhone iOS 4 or later How it works is pretty simple.

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To follow up on two previous posts, the Buckethead concert and making your own YouTube bootlegs, I’m going to add just a little more. As I mentioned, the concert was great. If I were to pick out one part, it would have been this lengthy untitled (as far as I know) freestyle jam he did with a simple looping beat. I cannot think of anything worse than falling in love with a song at a concert, and not knowing the name of it.

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Outside the GAMH Since I say this after almost every concert I go to, I’ll not forget to repeat it again: This was the BEST show I’ve ever seen. There are many aspects why: smaller venue, and our seats were on the balcony. This gave us a great view of the show, and we were pretty darn close to everything. Oh, and you know, it is one of my favorite artist doing what he does best.

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I’ve been using Puppet at work for the handful of FreeBSD and, recently, Ubuntu desktops. Aside from some very simple system configuration management (I’ve not yet dived too deep into puppet. I mostly use it for configuring system authentication and ensuring a particular computer security baseline), I though it would have been great to store the client’s “facts” into a accessable database. Sometime last year, Puppet added the ability to store facts into a Couch Database: http://www.

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Every year, for the last 12 years or so, the National Laboratories have held a technical conference for IT. A different lab hosts it each year, and the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado was nice enough to volunteer. I should point out, this conference is not in any way funded by the Department of Energy. It is sponsored by Vendors. I have never been to NLIT before, but this year I felt I had a significant contribution to make and it was worth the effort of submitting an abstract and putting together a nice presentation.

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We lost a great companion on Friday. Our super awesome dog, Zoey, passed away due to a heart complication (cardiomyopathy). She was just over 6 years old ( 05-04-2005 to 06-10-2011). She was diagnosed two weeks ago, and we knew what to expect. It was terribly sad to see her in such poor shape, however, I’m glad I had two weeks to hug her, feed her delicious food, and tell her that I love her.

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