sysadmin

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.

Linux Virtual Server
The Linux Virtual Server Project is a project to cluster many real servers together into a highly available, high-performance virtual server. The LVS load balancer handles connections from clients and passes them on the the real servers (so-called Layer 4 switching) and can virtualize almost any TCP or UDP service, like HTTP, HTTPS, NNTP, FTP, DNS, ssh, POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, etc. It is fully transparent to the client accessing the virtual service.
Homepage: http://www.LinuxVirtualServer.org/

BalanceNG

Many of us development and engineering teams leverage defect (bug) tracking systems that provide some organization to our work processes and overall goals of our projects that we have been working on.  In the past I've worked exclusively with AxoSoft's Ontime defect tracking suite which is by far one of the best commercial applications on the market.  I was posed a pretty difficult task here recently with one of my clients, in proving why a defect tracker will help the business grow and become more streamlined.  So I was off to find an open soure defect track

I was working on my production Vyatta routing infrastructure today and thought this would be some helpful and useful information for someone out there.  Many people set their NIC’s to auto-negotiate which is fine for quick and easy setups, but I’ve found this can be a culprit of many network latency issues in datacenter environments.  So I’m going to walk you through the steps of configuring your WAN NIC for 100MB Full Duplex and your internal or your LAN NIC for 1000MB Full Duplex

  As many of you sysadmins that deal with Linux High Availability and clusters you will find that there has been a nice little utility to ease the burden on your DRDB management.  The DRDB Management Console doesn’t require any agents or additional code added to your nodes but administers everything over ssh as if you were going to do your work anyways.   The nice thing about this utility is that you can manage everything from a GUI window and it still shows you the act console commands that are being given.  Which can be a learning utility for your junior admin that you have sitting under you that you’d like to start managing the clusters or have an idea how things work and can step in on the pager rotation and hopefully get you out of it for a little bit.

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....

I have been fiddling with Vyatta quite a bit recently in attempt to reduce our Cisco footprint in the datacenter.  Their solution has been the best fit for our needs that I can find.  One topic that the documentation didn't touch on much is that of "Port Forwarding" as most of us know it by.

Vyatta refers to this topic as DNAT, this requires that you have NAT enabled in your configuration.

  As many of us know our edge routing can get complex quickly.  Worst of all, it can get downright expensive when working with "high-end" propietary hardware such as Cisco, Juniper, Foundry, etc.  What this article is going to cover is a few ways to reduce your total cost of operations (TCO), streamline edge routing managability, and reduce your carbon footprint.  I for one work with a very complex Cisco environment which consists of WAN aggregation, load balanced and high availability firewalls, multiple subnets, and of course roadwarrior vpns.  The solutions presented in this article are all open source and provide all the needs that one would need to consilidate your Cisco equipment and feel better about yourself.  The major requirement of this peice is everything should configure and work properly in Vmware ESXi.  This article can be extended for Datacenter, Service Provider, Home Use, SMB use.  What I'm going to focus on is Home Use first, then a later date focus on full-on datacenter edge routing consolidation via Vyatta.

As everyone has already heard Oracle is buying / merging with Sun Microsystems who is the current owner of the MySQL technology.  Since Oracle is a huge database software vendor I suspect that they will kill the MySQL technology although they say the initial press releases on the merger deem that Not a whole lot is going to change in the direction of some of Sun's Projects (Java, OpenSolaris, ZFS, Open Office), but time will only tell where the future of MySQL will be.  As part of my full-time job is to stay ahead of the curve and provide perfect and long lasting solutions to our customer.   This is the reason you will be seeing quite a few PostgreSQL posts in the next few days as I'm quite green on the database server, but my learning curve, resources, and links will come out in my consistent posts in regards to Security, Application Migration from MySQL to PostgreSQL, Data protection, high availability etc.

Today is a huge day in the world of web development and database development as Oracle has acquired Sun Microsystems.  The reason that this is such a huge deal is that Sun holds a great deal of high value cards when it comes to what is being leveraged on the web today such as MySQL and Java are the largest developments coming out of the Sun house.  Right behind  those two technologies is the Microsoft Office alternative that I personally enjoy using and has became a standard for most Linux users and that is OpenOffice, and the enterprise datacenter server operating system that put Sun Microsystems on the map Solaris.  There are also some very influential research coming out of Sun Microsystems and the most widely known and adopted technology is their ZFS file system that FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Apple are leveraging as a