Computers ⁽¹²⁸⁾

Brian Bilbrey November 19, 2014

Jet Lagged in Seattle

That was me. The first five mornings of my seven odd days at LISA'14 in Seattle started between 0400 and 0430 in the morning, as my body insisted it was time to rise and shine. The most fun, though, was the wake-up due to SMS, when our garage door failed to open for Marcia. Turns out the spring catastrophically unsprung itself overnight Sunday night (though Marcia couldn't figure out the source of that noise until morning). Fortunately, "catastrophically" didn't include damage to either house or cars. She consulted, then called Overhead Door, who came out and made it all better,…

Brian Bilbrey November 16, 2014

Post, pending

I got back from attending LISA 14 - the six day, annual, USENIX Large Infrastructure Systems Administration conference - in Seattle late last night. I've not had time to compose my trip report, but I wanted to check in and say, "Hey, y'all." I'll be back in a few days with more to report. I'm back on call, and quite tired. Oh, yeah: tomorrow's wake-up time is at 0300 as far as my body clock is concerned. Go, me. * * * Our condolences to the family and friends of Sgt. 1st Class Michael A. Cathcart, 31, of Bay City,…

Brian Bilbrey November 2, 2014

Space, Patch, Read

A number of folks who lack a sense of wonder, a sense of adventure, a ... spine, perhaps, are whinging in articles here and there online about how awful it is that Michael Tyner Alsbury died testing a near-space tourist plane. How very risk-averse we've become, as a culture. I'd do his job tomorrow, in a heartbeat, if they'd let me. The wonder and joy of experimentation, research at the edges of what's possible make life worth living, either personally or vicariously (for those of us too old to but dream). Again, risk vs. reward. * * * Today I…

Brian Bilbrey October 26, 2014

Patch Sunday, plus Valentine and Banks

A week or two ago, the Oracle quarterly CPU (Critical Patch Updates) notification went out. So I scheduled my Solaris patching for the maintenance day I have: Sundays. The first round went fine today. Next Sunday, I'll do the rest. Solaris patching is just about the least troublesome thing I have to do. It takes a fair bit of time, but the reversion path on Solaris 10 with the Boot Environment (BE) feature is as safe as houses (well, not houses badly built in an earthquake zone, or ramblers built on slabs on a flood plain, but you know what…

Brian Bilbrey October 14, 2014

Backup Discussion

On the topic of backups... I like redundancy and backups. Redundancy is this: I have more than one copy of the data on more than one disk in my important systems. So: Mirrored disks == good. This protects me from one of the disks going bad. If the system blows up, or if I simply need a copy of a file I deleted by accident, I need a copy that's either not part of the mirror, hidden from view, or NOT on the system. Here's how I go about that. Having a local copy of something so that when it…