freebsd training

2011-08-18 | #Featured #FreeBSD #Geekyness #Training

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.


bacula in the enterprise part 2

2011-07-23 | #Backups #Bacula #Featured #FreeBSD #Geekyness #Jenny #ZFS

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.


bacula in the enterprise part 1

2011-07-22 | #Backups #Bacula #Featured #FreeBSD #Geekyness #ZFS

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.


using duplicity

2011-07-20 | #Backups #Duplicity #FreeBSD #Geekyness

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).


cheap two factor authentication with google

2011-07-18 | #Featured #FreeBSD #Geekyness #Google Authenticator #PAM

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.


more fun with ffmpeg

2011-07-16 | #buckethead #ffmpeg #FreeBSD #Geekyness #Music

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.


buckethead live gamh

2011-07-15 | #buckethead #Featured #kickassery #Music

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.


couchdb and ruby on freebsd

2011-06-22 | #CouchDB #Featured #FreeBSD #Geekyness #Puppet

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.


nlit 2011 vail colorado

2011-06-18 | #Featured #Geekyness #LLNL

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.


zoey

2011-06-12 | #Family #Featured

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.