Today on this ol' server
Where am I?
How do you know if the host you're logged in to is a zone or a global zone?[Read More]
Posted at 02:35PM Feb 06, 2008 by saf in Sun | Comments[1]
EV Rally@Paly
The Electric Car Rally is happening this weekend at Paly Highschool from 10 to 4. And there's an electric car conversion workshop the next day.
Posted at 10:58AM Aug 24, 2007 by saf in events | Comments[2]
foggy on the bridge
Some winters back I crossed the Golden Gate Bridge on my old trofeo. It was truly one of those clasic dark and stormy mights. I knew kcbs had announced high wind advisory for the bridge that night. I thought, naw it's only raining a little bit. I've cycled in the rain before, this isn't going to be that big of a deal. Ahaha. ... If I had talked to anyone, they would have talked me out of it. Oh, you're just a girl, you can't do that. But I didn't and I'll always remember as one of my most favorite rides of all time.[Read More]
Posted at 06:41PM Aug 13, 2007 by saf in cycling | Comments[2]
Happy System Admin Day
It's great to take a step back and have a good laugh with that pat on the back your friends, coworkers and acquaintances gave you today. So in honor of System Administrator day, here's an old posting of a field guide on how to identify your system admin.
Then, make your life easier, go check out BigAdmin and what's new onOS announce.
Happy System Administrator Day!
Posted at 04:47PM Jul 27, 2007 by saf in events | Comments[2]
Beyond Mt Home Inn
Last Tuesday late afternoon I biked beyond Mountain Home Inn, just before the cut off for Pantoll road roughly 1300 ft. It's the first time I've gone that far up Mt. Tam-- roughly seven miles of consistant climbing. I thought it was the highest elevation I've been on a bike (ride starting at sea level) but it's not. Apparently according to Google earth the intersection of Skyline blvd and Old La Honda Road is just shy of 1700 ft. It was the longest ride with consistent climbing I've done to date. It was breathtaking. Plug in 2000 Panoramic hwy in to google earth and toggle the eye level altitude.
Posted at 12:21AM Jun 16, 2007 by saf in cycling | Comments[0]
Looking at NGOs decentralized
Went to Long Now seminar by Paul Hawken. Was amazed how many NGOs there are, (he includes both human rights and environmental watchdog groups as ngos). Literally there are just overa hundred thousand. He says this is the first time we've had a social movement that is decentralized. Reminds me of the rise of opensource. Talked with a religious expert and he said that the Catholic church would have remote churches where the priest would be the head and they would be more or less autonomous from the rest of the org. To which I said that was a local phenomenon, and they they still had to be "under the rules" of the parent org. (centralized) Reminds me of source code management. Paraphrasing Stephen Hahn, you can have a decentralized source code management software act like a centralized one at a local level, where as a centralized scm can't act like a decentralized model.
My friend and I started to talk about why this is happening now and hasn't before, and came up with the collective community answer, near-real time communication. This is the first time a large majority of the population can communicate with each other in near-real time. (I say collective community answer because I think I've heard this before, maybe not in this exact context but certainly applied to opensource.)
Paul Hawken also likened ngos to our immune system. which is funny as most medical texts use the war/battle metephore to describe the immune systems function. The war/battle metaphore is a transaction based metaphor. I like NGOs as I can see them as a transformational metaphor -- bottoms up, grassroots orgs decentralized changing the way we see and do things. Maybe I'm just too old school to see the immune system in a transformational way, today.
Humm, brings new meaning to think globally, act locally. Sorry couldn't resist a coding joke.
Posted at 11:05AM Jun 11, 2007 by saf in musing | Comments[0]
mini license plate
Driving up and down 101 I've seen a fair few license plates. I was going to get my own on that Mini I've been eyeing since the Minis were rereleased. First it was new vs old Mini, then Cooper vs Cooper S, and later on Cooper S vs Cooper S with the works kit. I had it all dreamed out. Even picked out a license plate. It was going to be Rat Thing, based on the half dog, half machine out of the book Snow Crash. This is because a Mini looks like a bull dog, and is a useful benevolent tool--a vehicle. Over the weekend I saw the license plate that took the cake. It belongs to a friend of mine. She is a transgender individual. She started out life as a boy. Her plate reads her initals space won. It's great. Just right. She won. She had courage and triumphed over her gender. She found control of her life and is able to live.
After seeing that plate, I don't need the Mini Works and the cute license plate. I'm good. I can wipe away that clutter, and focus on what really matters.
Posted at 10:47PM Mar 06, 2007 by saf in Personal | Comments[2]
Time Management for system administrators
This year started off with a bang. I did finally start to stick to that organizer. Being a system admin, I never really have time to leave a terminal. There's this one more ticket, there's this one more server, this just this one more email, no, over here, this really important user, over there, there's this important manager's manager. The good news is sysadmintaffyosis can be treated.
I found Tom Limoncelli's "Time Management for System Administrators". It has absolutely saved my sanity (other than cycling.) Tom presented to BayLISA a while back, and google has some of the videos.
Tom's system admin blog is also a great resource,
and Ben Rockwood recently updated his techniques.
I have been able to get more work done, by implementing the cycle system. Step one is to not read email when I first get to work. After 21 days, I've trained myself to resist email until I update my PAA and (manually) sync it with my electronic calendar. (For those of you who don't have the book and have missedemailphobia, if something truly important were to happen an email would go to my phone, or someone would call me.)
Way to go Tom for this awesome resource.
Also, if any of you readers really dig the videos please email the good people at baylisa so they will know to continue to tape and update the videos. Without feedback from the community, the baylisa group will just go back to playing nethack.
Posted at 01:11AM Feb 06, 2007 by saf in Sun | Comments[0]
Resource Management on Solaris 10 and beyond
At the last Opensolaris Silicon valley user group meeting, Ben Rockwood lamented how hard it is to understand resource management.
That reminded me of how I really had to read through the docs and play with the commands to get the tunings right. In this forum post I explained how to set the tunings needed for DB2 at the time of the forum post.
A few key concepts can help with tunings:
- check that you really need to tune. If you're running the latest and greatest OS build, chances are the tunings are right, or if your hardware is sufficient large, the default tunings will be sized up, and should be correct for most apps.
- beware of documention that says add this setting to /etc/system. /etc/system isn't used in Solaris 10 and beyond for managing most resources. (There are some bug fixes, that can only be set in /etc/system.) Most resource tuning and tweaking can only happen by resource management commands, prjadd(1M), projmod(1M), project(4), rctladm(1M), setrctl(2), prctl(1)
- Always use the documentation that came with the specific OS version you're running. The tunings vary from releases, the what's new, and Tunable Parameters Reference Manual will have the most accurate instructions.
- Some tunings can be set on a per project basis others are set on a per process basis, but is inherited by user per project.
- When in doubt test: use newtask -p project id name command, and check the resource tunings with prctl.
bash-3.00$ newtask -p myproject sleep 100 & bash-3.00$ prctl $! [1] 14027 process: 14027: sleep 100 NAME PRIVILEGE VALUE FLAG ACTION RECIPIENT process.max-port-events privileged 65.5K - deny - ...
Posted at 12:46AM Jan 29, 2007 by saf in Sun | Comments[1]