The SysAdmin Diary

SysAdminDiary.com loses its virginity

That’s right, SysAdminDiary.com is no longer a comment-spam virgin. Today it received it’s first spam comment, 20 days after my first post. I’m actually kind of surprised it didn’t happen sooner. I have several other blogs and they receive hundreds of spam comments per day. Fortunately I have Akismet to protect me, which does an absolutely amazing job at filtering comment spam.

And here’s the spam that popped my blogs comment-spam cherry:

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Posted in Spam, Blogging, Internet | No Comments »

Blogs added to Planet SysAdmin - 19 August 2007

I’ve added a few more blogs to Planet SysAdmin in the last week or so:

• Anton Chuvakin Blog - “Security Warrior”
• Everything Sysadmin
• Life of a Sysadmin (thanks to Saint Aardvark)
• The FreeBSD Diary

Please let me know if you know of any other sysadmin related blogs that should be here!

                              

Posted in Planet SysAdmin, Blogging, Internet | No Comments »

Installing FreeBSD 6.2 on a Soekris net5501

Today I installed and configured FreeBSD 6.2 on a Soekris Engineering net5501 (which was purchased by mail order from Yawarra Information Appliances in Victoria, who have been very helpful). It will be functioning as an office firewall/gateway. This particular unit has a 433MHZ AMD Geode Integrated Processor and 256MB of RAM, and most importantly — 4 ethernet interfaces. The operating system is installed on a 1GB CompactFlash card, but it also has a laptop hard-disk interface and if you really want to you can get CF adapters for full sized hard-disks.

I initially intended to use pfSense for this device, but quickly ran in to problems. pfSense only supports a single PPPoE connection (on the ‘WAN’ interface), and you can only configure any remaining interfaces (in this case OPT1 and OPT2) as regular ethernet interfaces. This is a problem, as we have two ADSL connections which are both PPP links. m0n0wall, on which pfSense is based also seems to have this limitation.

So I made the decision to install regular ol’ FreeBSD instead. I ran in to numerous problems attempting to install it via serial console (which I won’t go in to in detail here, I may write a rant about this on another day) and ended up deciding instead to set up the system in VMWare, and then burn the image of the VM’s hard-disk to the CompactFlash card and continue from there. These are the steps I took to get a working FreeBSD 6.2 installation on my Soekris net5501:

Read the rest of this entry »

                              

Posted in Embedded systems, VMWare, Software, Tips and Tricks, Operating Systems, Hardware, FreeBSD | 4 Comments »

IT versus Management

I quite liked this joke that I received today, so much so that I think I’ll share it with you.

A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You’re between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be in IT,” said the balloonist. “I am,” replied the woman, “How did you know?”

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Posted in Management, Humour | 1 Comment »

Hack for the Dole

I’ve just learned that recipients of unemployment benefits (welfare/”the dole”) here in Australia are able to fulfill their “Work for The Dole” (”mutual obligation” — service to the community to continue receiving welfare benefits) requirements by contributing to open source software projects — whether by providing their services as a programmer, writing documentation, contributing artwork, etc.

CommunityCode, an organisation responsible for the scheme in Sydney launched the idea at Linux.conf.au in 2005. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have progressed far since then. The CommunityCode Wiki was edited a few times between 2005 and mid-2006 but has been dormant since. I would be very interested to know if the scheme has had any success, or if there are any other community groups offering open source project work as a mutual obligation activity.

                              

Posted in Open Source, Society | No Comments »

Blogs added to Planet SysAdmin - 14 August 2007

I have added the following blogs to Planet SysAdmin in the last couple of days:

• A Linux SysAd Blog by Vertito
• Adnans Sysadmin/Dev Blog
• Debian Administration
• O’Reilly Sysadmin
• Steve Kemp’s Blog
• The Blog of Ben Rockwood
• The Daily ACK
• The Debian User
• The Hive Archive
• Unix Admin Corner
• Wolfgang Lonien
• Yet Another Sysadmin’s Blog
• jeffx - random thoughts of a random geek
• the life of a sysadmin.

Please let me know if you know of any other sysadmin related blogs that should be here!

                              

Posted in Planet SysAdmin, Blogging, Internet | 1 Comment »

FreeBSD 4.x SMP kernel panic on non-SMP machine

Following the death this afternoon of a (somewhat critical) FreeBSD 4 machine here in the office, I hurriedly swapped the hard disk out of it’s original machine (a white-box Pentium 4 of some description which hangs every few minutes) in to the first available “spare” machine I found; a single processor AMD Athlon XP 2000+. I threw a few extra NIC’s in the machine and fired it up and bam — kernel panic on boot.

Read the rest of this entry »

                              

Posted in Hardware, Operating Systems, FreeBSD | 2 Comments »

Planet SysAdmin - SysAdmin blog aggregator

I’ve just created a blog aggregator just for SysAdmin blogs - check it out at planetsysadmin.com. You can also subscribe to the feed at http://planetsysadmin.com/atom.xml.

Please feel free to recommend any other SysAdmin related blogs that you know of - just leave a comment here and I’ll be sure to add it if it’s relevant!

                              

Posted in Planet SysAdmin, Planet Feed Reader, Blogging, Internet, Software | 15 Comments »