The journey continues...

Brian Bilbrey

Week Off - Objective Completed

Well, I got a fair bit done, and some reading, and learned a bit about Puppet, too! I also got the fence sealed: They're coated in Olympic Maximum stain/sealer, "Natural Cedar Tone." From this vantage, it looks a bit like spray-on suntan, but I'm sure it'll weather in well. I'll probably recoat in the spring. There's more of course. I finished reading The Hydrogen Sonata. I wish Banks were with us still - there are plenty more tales in Culture Space. I also got through John Arundel's Puppet 3 Beginner's Guide. I've been wanting to get into Configuration Management for…

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Brian Bilbrey

Holiday Week

I'm burning off a couple of weeks of leave between now and the end of the year. As usual in such times, I start one of those weeks off with a stint of physical labor to kick off the front end. Yup, it's time to finish up the fence. Last month I did the left fence sections. Yesterday, I started by cutting the fence sections away from the posts, and setting them aside nearby: The two free-standing posts are problematic. One of them has a 45° twist in it, the other has a serious lean. So they're coming out. How…

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Brian Bilbrey

Choresday

That's my new name for the `day formerly known as Sunday`. Today was full of shopping, laundry, car washing and paint maintenance, coffee roasting, and computer rebuilding. Only the latter was really interesting. I had a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo, courtesy of work, to be able to do more VM work here at home. Now the processor is faster and hyperthreaded, and the RAM is faster, and more (32G). I took advantage of the rebuild occasion to remove the old Linux MD device, and installed the ZFSonLinux module and tools. Now my data store is a ZFS raidz1 pool, built from…

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Brian Bilbrey

Six Days of LISA '13

Howdy. My name's Brian, and I'm a tired SysAdmin... So, six days of tutorials and talks at the USENIX LISA '13 conference are done. And it was good. My behind is, however, glad to be shut of those hotel conference chairs. Sunday, 3 November Sunday's full day tutorial was called Securing Linux Servers, and was taught by Rik Farrow, a talented bloke who does security for a living, and is Editor of the USENIX ;login: magazine on the side. We covered the goals of running systems (access to properly executing services) and the attacks that accessibility (physical, network) enable. As always,…

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