Monthly Archives: July 2016

I am pleased to announce that Mike Weilgart and I will be delivering professional training for Ohio Linux Fest Institute in October. I will teach “Time Management for System Administrators” and Mike will teach “Git Foundations: Unlocking the Mysteries”. You … Continue reading →

One of my clients is at the ssh “for” loop stage of automation maturity, so I installed Ansible. Because of selinux and Python version issues, I’m using the “raw” mode (which doesn’t require Python on the hosts, it just runs … Continue reading →

I recently spoke at Digital Media Educators Conference (DMEC) on Infrastructure Management at Scale and the skills educators need to impart to up and coming system administrators. This conference serves the California community college system, which is dear to my … Continue reading →

I encourage *nix sysadmins to go to the annual USENIX LISA conference and avail themselves of the training there. USENIX is the UNIX Users Group. Around since the seventies, it is now a global professional society spanning industry and academia. … Continue reading →

RPM database corruption is a common problem on Red Hat Linux systems at scale. When it happens, you have to rebuild the RPM database: – https://access.redhat.com/solutions/6903 – http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/rebuilding-corrupted-rpm-database.html I am working on automating this repair with CFEngine. In the meantime, … Continue reading →

The other day, I wanted to find out which RPM metadata field was used to store the “el6” value in the “rpm -q” output for a package, e.g: [root@as-ws-pr-la-01 Desktop]# rpm -q kernel-2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64 kernel-2.6.32-504.el6.x86_64 [root@as-ws-pr-la-01 Desktop]# This came up because … Continue reading →