Posts Tagged ‘sysadmin’

More Sysadmin Truths

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

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Another great blog entry from lonesysadmin.net! I’ve been burned too many times by upgrades too. Either they fail or leave a lot of cruft behind. As a result, I try and do fresh installs whenever I can. Or use linux distros such as Gentoo which are designed to handle rolling upgrades.

To make installations as easy as possible, I try and set up the infrastructure to automate it. I wish there was one common way to do this. Instead I’ve had to use kickstart, jumpstart, IgniteUX, and multiple Windows techniques. It’s a pain to go through this exercise but it pays off in the long run when kicking off a system build only takes a few minutes.

” In-Place Upgrades Suck” by The Lone Sysadmin

[tags]sysadmin, geek, gentoo, automation[/tags]

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Data Hoarding (or Why Are We Out of Disk Space Again?)

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

As a systems administrator/configuration engineer, I’m well aware of the value in organizing and maintaining data. But as this blog posting by a fellow sysadmin attests, often we go overboard.

If you’ve worked in IT long enough, you’ve heard the platitude that “disk space is cheap”. Sure, compared to the washing machine sized disks from the mainframe era it is cheap, but it’s still far from next to nothing. And I don’t think it ever will be. In terms of hardware, enterprise RAID storage is still more expensive than the $1k consumer terrabyte media servers that are becoming popular. But the human cost is always there- time spent searching through useless data, time spent shuffling ancient data between servers, time spent backing up data that will never be looked it.

” Only Keep What We Need” by The Lone Sysadmin

[tags]sysadmin, storage[/tags]

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