Author Archives: Aleksey Tsalolikhin

About 15 years ago, I was the only UNIX sys admin in a factory, and I was asked to help with a “network issue” which hit the Help Desk. The problem, it was explained to me, was that the network … Continue reading →

I charge US $3,000 per training day, plus a US $2,000 admin fee, to come on-site and train up to 12 staff using a training methodology that ensure that deep learning occurs. Some people have pushed back on the price … 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 →

Mike Weilgart is going to repeat his “Taming the Git Filesystem” talk on June 23rd in Burbank. In the meantime, here is what attendees said about the debut of this talk June 2nd at UUASC-LA/LOPSA-LA meetup: “You definitely filled out … Continue reading →

These are some working notes for identifying critical unpatched vulnerabilities on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system (version 6). If you install yum-security plugin, you can list security updates available and which CVEs they relate to, as well as their … Continue reading →

Recently Yves Dorfsman asked on the lopsa-tech mailing list: A lot of people love to hate bash, and there are good reasons for it, but it seems that there isn’t an obvious replacement for it. […] What do you use? … Continue reading →