It’s true - one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. I know this to be true because I was the recent recipient of such a fortune. Back in October, I was talking to an old friend of mine over instant messenger, and I had mentioned that I was working with some old UltraSparc1 machines (thank you Ed Corrado). My friend thought I was wasting my time, and mentioned that he was about to throw away 4 old Dell workstations and an ancient Dell server. A quick arrangement was made, and I set a date to drive up to Manhattan and pick them up. (more…)

I was originally going to title this post “The Reaon I’m a Terrible Systems Administrator”, but on further reflection I changed it to “The Primary Reason… ” and finally to “One of the Many Reasons…” before I decided to give up and put the title more in context. For now I’ll just thank my lucky stars that my current gig has me doing heavy PL/SQL development instead.

I’ve wasted a lot of hours the last two weeks trying to troubleshoot issues with my network at home. In two specific cases, I could have avoided a lot of frustration and grief if I had only checked the log files immediately, instead of pounding google and attempting a hodge-podge of fixes that didn’t work (more…)

Upgrade Woes
Okay, So I forgot to add the structure and adminitration grants back to the wordpress mySQL user on my machine. It was a pretty innocent mistake. You know it right away, because the upgrade script throws a bunch of errors when it’s trying to make tables. You add the grants and run the upgrade script. No big deal right? (more…)

Last Tuesday at the LUG/IP Hardware SIG Jerry showed up with a couple of old Sun SPARCstation4 machines. They were going to the great machine recycling center in the sky unless someone wanted them. While I don’t necessarily have a use for the machine, I thought that attempting to get Linux running on it might provide some new experiences, so I grabbed the machines. These were just boxes - no keyboard, mouse or monitor included. (more…)

Today I was trying to update my mail server, a CentOS 4.2 machine with Bill Shupps qmail toaster. After running “yum update” I noticed that exim was going to be installed as a dependency. I was afraid another mail server on my machine was going to mess things up, so I canceled the update. Then I began the frustrating process of trying to figure out what depended on exim. (more…)