admin's blog

I'm not sure how relevant this is to anyone else out there, but here recently I've been doing some spring cleaning on my storage array with my music, apps, movies, pictures, and document archives. I found this nice little utility for Windows (Yes I know, none of my machines run Windows so this didn't help me any making my process any quicker) I downloaded it and played around with it on my Windows 7 VM, and I was very surprised that something like this hasn't been around for longer than it has.

Distribution Release: Fedora 11 - Red Hat has announced the release of Fedora 11, the latest version of the leading open-source Linux distribution: "The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating....

Distribution Release: OpenSolaris 2009.06 - OpenSolaris 2009.06 has been released: "Today marks the release of OpenSolaris 2009.06, the third release of the OpenSolaris operating system. We've shifted gear, bringing you a new set of features right to your door, from the desktop to the data center. New features: network virtualization with Crossbow; turn....

Centralizing your data

One of the biggest tasks for most people is to get all their data in a central managable location that they know where it is and its easy to backup and managed and reliable.  For home networks a great solution for this is to leverage a NAS type solution.   My suggestion would be to build a storage server and install the latest build of OpenSolaris and make use of their ZFS filesystem to ensure your data is consistent and managable.

Well I'm going to try a little something different, and make a rant post giving a couple nice links to some interesting reads and getting a little bit of information dumped into you mind all at once.  This is not going to be the most directed or organized post of mine, but who cares... it makes things a little more interesting.

Top 10 Open Source CRM Solutions - InsideCRM.com

http://www.insidecrm.com/features/top-open-source-solutions-121307/

 As some of you have heard I have been working on finding a pretty seamless automatic self managing backup solution for my home machines, as well as to finish a project up at work.   There were a couple requirements of the solution.  It had to be able to only backup bit level changes of the data.  Managed from a single central location.  E-mail Alerts.  Basic Reporting.  Web Based Administration.

Elive is a Debian based linux distro, so all of you Ubuntu fan boys its the same basic distro with noticable enhancements and tweaks to the UI.  Some major points to point out here is that the desktop manager is leveraging Enlightment which is Gtk based and very quick, light on resources, and customizable till no end.  The menu system is left and right mouse click driven similar to that of fluxbox.   The Application Dock is an actual portion of the Enlightment Desktop Manager.

I have been running Elive in a VMWare environment for 2 weeks now and am very pleased with how it is working and how quick and easy things were to pick up with the distribution.  The great thing is everything that you WANT installed is installed from the get go (mp3, flash, dvd, etc)  This is definitely more of a desktop driven distribution, but to throw it through the rings I went through some quick tests to make sure nothing was outa the ordinary with the build.  To do this I planned on setting up a mail server with virtual hosts, a LAMP environment and install Roundcube, vtiger CRM, and of course Drupal 6.10.   After that I made sure that I could properly backup the machine leveraging BackupPC.

I've been wanting to discuss some of the utilities that I have been using here as of late and give a little feed back on them.  Featured in this particular article is DestroyTwitter an Adobe Air twitter client that rivals twirl and is much cleaner to work with than twirl.  I will also be discussing some of the core Drupal modules that I have found to be almost essential in every Drupal site that I have been working on recently.  NovaNET-WEB v10 Beta 3 was released not too long ago and I will be doing a short synopsis of the overall state of the server and client.   Lastly I will be discussing a utility that has basically made my sysadmin life 100% easier since implementing and that is haproxy

So as you may have heard I have moved on from NovaStor and have began my work with a very ambitious company called DataHEALTH.  They primarily provide online backup services.  I have been brought aboard to help expand the business and customerbase to a larger demographic than just the medical industry.  This is a very exciting opportunity for me and the people I will be working in collaboration with are very great and intelligent people to work with.

My first weekend was pretty eventful / non-eventful.  I got in Thursday which was Chicago's coldest day in history from the past 8 years.  Of course flying into Chicago was a headache as always during the winter time.  I had  a layover in Phoenix and of course since I went the Cheap-ass route for my fare which actually ended up costing me quite a bit (stupid luggage fees!!) . The plane that was making the trip from Phoenix to Chicago had something wrong on it... so everyone was boarded and then the infamous intercom anoucement "Folks, the engineers are working on this issue, they are estimating 1 - 1.5 hours"  I was like great! So knowing me, I can't sit still for the life of me I'm fidgiting like ahhh com'on lets fucking move already!.  Once we got landed I was sooo cold in the jetway and the terminal I was like there is no way this is going to work.  So I got my taxi, who did an amazing job of avoiding the rush hour bullshit, and made it to the Westin on Michigan Ave. right around 4:30PM.  Then me and my friend went to one our favorite places to Tavern on Rush which serves the best Prime Rib Steak Teryaki lil sticker thinger for an appetizer that I've had.

One of my clients has a production SuSE Enterprise Server 9 file server in place and their previous network administrator was a little power trippy so nothing was documented and shortcuts were taken to make things work.

This server is a fairly basic configuration the primary use of the server is to serve files of a samba share and to provide network printing capabilities.

After the restore of all the data the server was unable to boot properly, thus they gave me a call early morning today which is all fine and dandy.  So we did some basic troubleshooting and I made the following conclusions:

• Upgrade the current OS (SELS 9) to the current OpenSuSE 11 revision
• Confirm Data Integrity of the production user shares
• Configure Samba as it was previously setup -- Confirm the workings
• Configure CUPS as it was previously setup -- Confirm the workings
• Install and Configure SNMP (They previously were not doing any performance monitoring so there was no indication of any resource utilization)
• Reconfigure NovaNET 11 backups to tape in effort to ensure proper RTO and minimal RPO

So far we're at the point of pulling down the OpenSuSE 11 dvd.... 3 hours into the migration :) I will post as progress is made.. fun times