October 2004 Archives

We're back up!

Sorry for the outage. The system was down and I was traveling or busy and couldn't get to the colo to bring it back up. Ah, the joys of do-it-yourself hosting. :-)

Tom will be at LISA 2004 teaching 2 tutorials, presenting an invited talk, and doing a book signing. LISA is the best system administration conference around. Please attend.

• Introduction to Massive Upgrades and Changes, Tutorial (Thu afternoon)
• Time Management for System Administrators: Getting It All Done and Not Going (More) Crazy!, Tutorial (Fri morning)
• Lessons Learned from Howard Dean's Digital Campaign , Invited Talk (Fri 2-3:30pm)
• Book signing (TBA)

Both tutorials are based on the book plus tons of new material.

Register today.

No, I'm not talking about Bush's bungling of the flu vaccine shortage. I'm talking about a simple quick check to see if a subnet is has an infected machine. This article teaches a little shell programming, a little about networks, and builds a little tool you can use on your own network to detect simple problems.

I'm really amazed at how much you can do with a blog plus a Wiki. If only someone could more tightly integrate them, in terms of username/password database, look and feel, and other issues.

Conference Chair Lee Demon (and his committee) has done a bang-up job planning this year's LISA conference. This year's conference is November 14–19, 2004 in Atlanta,GA.

We've added a TWiki to the web site. Our hope is that the many, many college instructors that are using the book will be able to use it to share notes, tips, and so on. Of course, everyone has access to it so we've put a space for people to write comments, etc. Eventually we'll start adding our own notes.

A large part of the software industry has never heard of the science of quality assurance - or if it has, it doesn't believe in it. Thus spake Alan Cox, Wales' most famous Red Hat employee and one of the most influential voices in the IT world. Currently wrapping up his MBA at Swansea University, it's clear that Cox has been spending a lot of time thinking about what the software world can learn from everyone else about quality.