Archive for 'February, 2011'

In spite of the loner stereotype that SysAdmins have, we’re rather social creatures typically. In my experience, IRC was, is and will continue to be king of real-time communication between techie types. I’ve had my bacon saved a few times by very helpful volunteers on various IRC channels. IRC as a medium provides a lot of features, history and culture and is unlikely to have a complete downfall. However, the medium isn’t exactly “light weight” for people new to the concept, and sometimes for old IRC hands it can still be something of a pain to set up a new client or even run a separate client on top of everything else that’s already running on their PC. Is IRC burdensome? Not exactly. However, a lighter weight medium might be nice once in a while.

Enter ServerFault’s new chat feature (okay, it’s half a year old, but it still has that new car smell). Actually, it’s a feature of the entire Stack Exchange family of sites. If you log into any Stack Exchange site, the most popular of which are ServerFault, StackOverflow and SuperUser, you will see a small link that says “Chat” at the top of the page (click to see a larger image).

The chat room is browser-based and is the single sharpest, most functional browser-based chat system I’ve ever experienced. I’m not sure how it’s made, but hats of to the creators. It may not be as fully functional as IRC (not even close), but for a simple means of exchanging real-time text chat in a browser, it’s unparalleled in my experience.

There are a few rules to consider with all Stack Exchange chat rooms. These are copied from Jeff Atwood’s blog post about the public beta of chat rooms back in August 2010.

• You must have a parent site account in good standing with at least 20 reputation to talk in the chat. So if you don’t have a ServerFault account, you can’t get into the ServerFault chat rooms. If you have an account on any Stack Exchange site via an OpenID account (in my case my Google ID), then you can easily create an associated account with any other Stack Exchange site in about 4 seconds. Just attempt to log in to the new site and select your OpenID provider.
• Before visiting chat, be sure you’re logged in at the parent site, because Stack Exchange uses the parent cookie to know who you are.
• Please read the chat faq. And if you’ve already read it, humor Jeff and read it again … it has changed, and they will continue to improve it over time.

Again, take a look at the chat FAQ to get familiar with the concept. Some things to keep in mind:

• You must have a reputation of 20 to chat. This keeps out drive-by “Do you haz teh codes” seekers. Twenty reputation points is pretty trivial to gain, so don’t worry.
• The chat room isn’t suited for troubleshooting and problem solving issues. That’s what the main Stack Exchange sites are for. That’s not to say that people won’t ask the occasional question on a topic, however deep discussion is usually directed to make an official question on a Stack Exchange site. The chat tends to be a great place for open ended discussions. Postfix vs sendmail and Linux vs BSD are recent examples of topics that come up. However, I’ve never seen discussions cross any friendly lines, so if you have an axe to grind, check it at the door because you won’t be accepted with it.
• The culture is laid back, non confrontational and not entirely politically correct. It’s helpful, casual and friendly. Long periods of silence are punctuated by rapid discussions about which wireless carrier rips off their customers worst, what the best brand of cheap bourbon is and the merits and demerits of sales tax (all real-life examples that I’ve seen talked about).
• There are multiple chat room associated with each site. For example, as of this post, ServerFault has three rooms. “The Comms Room” (general banter; most popular), “ServerFailt: Vote to Close” (A place for links to be posted to questions that should likely be closed) and “Backup and Disaster Recovery” (No idea where this one came from, it’s not inhabited and will likely be closed soon).

Here’s a screenshot of the larger Stack Exchange community of chat rooms. As of this posting, there are 22 active rooms with 60 users spread out between them:

If you’re a SysAdmin and would like to find a group of likeminded professionals to gab with, head on over to ServerFault’s chat rooms (specifically The Comms Room) and join us!

I admit it. I know a decent amount about things that most SysAdmins seem to shun and disdain. No, I’m not talking about my Hello Kitty T-shirt and watch collection. I’m talking about social media and internet marketing. Much of my knowledge about those things was attained because of starting my own business and launching a few websites either on my own or with friends. When you’re doing a “two guys in a garage” business venture (or a “one guy living in his mother’s basement” project), everyone has to wear a few separate hats. And by “a few separate hats” I mean “try this kitchen sink on for size.”

As a result I’ve had to spend many, many hours researching things like Twitter, FaceBook (still a mystery to me since I don’t use it personally), online advertising (including but not limited to CPC, CPA, CPM and affiliate marketing), SEO, SEM, blogging and taking all of the metrics each topic can gather and trying to find something meaningful from them.

(Image by Nancy “Dot D” Dorsner)

Often in the last six months I’ve stopped in the midst of mentally squeezing down a social media rabbit hole and wondered “What am I even doing?” Am I the same person who could zone out and spend hours upon hours spec’ing out NAS systems? Am I the same person who found it therapeutically rejuvenating to pour over Juniper’s product line? How far I have come.

That’s not to say that I wouldn’t rather be learning about Juniper equipment than trying to get a FaceBook following for a client’s products.  But really, if you think about it, it kinda makes sense for me to know both. I don’t like to define myself as a “technology person”. I like to try and be “that problem solving guy” or “that efficiency person”. I see a problem, I cogitate on the problem, I solve the problem. Or I at least make it less of a problem than it was before I saw it. That can mean fixing a problem with how dishes are washed at church to getting a doctor’s office’s computer systems to pass a HIPAA audit. That can also mean making my clients more visible to their potential customers than they currently are.

I’m not saying I’m a social media expert by any means. However, one place that I do work for had some great educational content to share with the world, but they just weren’t doing much of anything about it. A bi-monthly printed newsletter to their list of supporters was as far as it went. I installed WordPress on their site and encouraged them to blog (with the help of someone else that worked internally). Now they have an awesome blog with lots of great content that’s directly educational and not just self promotion! The next problem was that no one was reading the blog. So I got them on a Twitter account and helped them grow their followers. Now they’ve got targeted traffic. The next step is to score some guest blog spots for them, get them on related blog lists, blog rolls and blog aggregators. They now have more traffic to their site than ever before and possible new supporters to their business as a result. Also, there’s some new excitement breathed into the organization as they see new people being exposed to their content and mission. Problem = solved.

I don’t think IT contractors can come close to replacing dedicated social media managers. However, often IT people are looked at as having special insight into the Twitters and the Facebooks and the bloggy things because “hey, they run on computers and you know about computers!” Especially when small offices often can’t afford highly specialized people for each facet of their business. I’m honestly thinking about adding a social media competency to my list of services that I offer to my clientele. Not pitching myself as a social media wizard, just like I don’t say I’m a highly trained storage specialist, but I know my way around storage enough to help out those in my market.

Are there any other IT contractors out there who also dabble in social media for clients? Personally, it’s not something I’m too ashamed of. I mean, people have needs. I have a brain. I combine the two and come up with solutions. But is it that unusual for an IT person to implement a backup solution one day and make a 5 step plan to creating more of an internet presence the next day?

And please tell me I’m not the only one to use Hello Kitty wallpapers on my work computer.

I like to keep track of itty bitty form factor PCs. You never know when you’ll need a tiny amount of processing power to run a router, thin client or just a family member’s “Webmail PC” as I sometimes call them. I just stumbled upon the ECOPC N.1A by EVO technologies.

Here’s some specs on it:

• Based on the Intel Atom N270 processors
• Can run Windows or Linux
• Uses 10~11W at idle
• Uses 16W at full CPU load with 2.5″ SSD
• Uses 18W with 2.5″ HDD
• Uses less than 1W at standby
• Can operate with or without it’s fan depending on ambient temps so it has the potential to be totally silent.
• 19.5cm in depth, 17.8cm in width and 4cm in height
• 12V DC input
• Can be attached to a flat screen TV or monitor using VESA mounts

Another interesting point quoted from their website is this:

The N.1 will last over 10 times longer than a standard over 100W PC from the same amount of stored power in battery. Moreover, it can run off a DC battery and does not required a inverter, because it uses 12V input. So it is solar/wind power friendly and also ideal as cars, trucks, boats.

The price starts at $285.99 USD (excluding Taxes and Duties).

Almost more interesting to me than the hardware was one of the two options for a preinstalled OS. Of course, the ubiquitous Ubuntu is made available, but the other option is a Linux based home server OS named Amahi. I’d never heard of the OS before and took a look at the website. Apparently it’s still in beta, but it seems easy enough to join the beta program.

Amahi is based on Fedora (yay!) and has the standard set of features that you’d expect from a home server OS. At least, I think it does. I’m not a huge “home server” user – if I need a server at home, I do it up hardcore and spawn a few Windows Server instances. Amahi has it’s own app store. It uses a customized version of FireFly Media Server that they call “AmahiTunes“. There’s also disk pooling, a VPN and a host of ways to back things up among other features. Check out the features page for a more thorough list.

I wasn’t able to discern if the distribution has plans on having a commercial element. No business model is presented that I could find. Who knows if this will be around in a year or two. I certainly hope so as it looks sweet. I’ve never been keen on the idea of purchasing Windows Home Server, so if there’s an open source alternative, I’m down with that.

Does anyone have experience with micro form factor PCs like the EVO ECOPC? How about a Linux based home server distribution like Amahi? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Last week I wrote about my decision to attempt to migrate from Windows to a Linux distribution. I asked for advice from folks in the blog post as well as on Twitter and received several days’ worth of awesome advice. Thanks to all who helped me out!

I think I’ve made a determination about which distribution I’m going to stick with: Fedora Linux.

Why the interest in this distro? Why not others like Ubuntu or Mint? Two primary reasons:

First, Fedora is an RPM based distribution from Red Hat that indicates where the stable RHEL may be going. If I learn Fedora, I’ll be familiar with RHEL and be able to use that experience in real life situations. I’ll also be able to garner some certifications to show what I know (important to me since I’m working as a contractor and need to preen myself in front of clients).

Second, Ubuntu, Mint and Pinguy (Why haven’t I heard of Pinguy sooner?!) are all awesome distributions that I’d go with in a heartbeat if I wasn’t an IT pro. In fact, the next person who is a candidate for replacing Windows with a desktop Linux distro will probably get either Mint or Pinguy from me. However, perhaps they’re a bit too safe in my case. I’d like for things to be ever so slightly less ready for mass consumption (Slackware and Gentoo fans, stop laughing). Fedora isn’t quite as polished as some other distros. As it is, I’ve already had some fun with yum and package kit not quite working and learned a lot in the process.

Last Saturday I installed Fedora 14 on my laptop and I’ve been ootching it along day by day since. However, I’m not going to commit to leaving Windows for it until two things happen first:

• Wait for the next kernel update just to make sure my nVidia driver takes the change nicely. It should since I used the akmod version, but… you never know.
• Get a good backup scheme going and perform a full, bare metal restoration of my environment with no lost applications, settings or data. I’d like to be able to perform the backup while the system is running and not resort to image CDs like clonezilla, but I will if that turns out to be the best way. I might make a clonezilla PXE boot server on another PC so I can boot off the network and do it.

Once those two things are completed, especially the backups, I’ll start the complete transition. I think Wine and VirtualBox seamless mode may play large parts in this transition, but I hope to be using as many native Linux apps as possible. I’m just not willing to give up Microsoft Outlook 2010 (it’s also unwise since I support many people who use it). Sorry Mutt fans.

Thanks again to all those who helped me in this choice and gave me awesome advice on how best to learn Linux. Looks like 2011 is shaping up to be a year full of learning. Any last pleas to try a different distro? (Some day I’ll try Gentoo. Promise!)

TL;DR I’m going to attempt to migrate from Windows to a Linux distribution as my main OS. I’ll probably have to dual boot with Windows because of a few apps that don’t virtualize or handle WINE well (Photoshop, Steam, etc.). I’ll virtualize Windows within Linux for the Windows apps that I can’t live without but do virtualize well. My only problem now is settling on a Linux distro. Care to offer a helpful opinion?

The Time Has Come!

The time has come for me to consider branching out and learning more about Linux than the crumbs that I’ve gathered from glancing interactions with the OS over the last few years. I’ve been more or less happily using Windows for years now. I haven’t had any terrible experiences with it. I actually liked Vista. Windows Server does a great job and Active Directory makes me happy. I’m not a Microsoft basher or Richard Stallman cheerleader. I don’t really care one way or the other about the OS that a person uses, as long as it was chosen for a good reason and it gets the job done well. I just think it’s time to get out of my comfort zone and attempt to be more of a polymath in my profession.

My first exposure to Linux was only a few years ago. My experience with computers was as a casual hobbyist from childhood until age 22 in 2004. As a result, I didn’t even know about such a thing as Linux until 2005 or so when I touched my first Linux distribution which was, to the best of my knowledge, a Fedora Core 4 Live CD. At that point in my life I was up to my eyeballs learning Windows Server and Active Directory so I paid little attention to it. Over the years I had more glancing encounters with the enigmatic penguin. Once I moved to Debian 4 as my main OS on an old Desktop for about 5 weeks in ’07 while my main Windows laptop went careening through the halls of Dell’s technical support complex in Dallas. (I dropped a ProCurve on it and funny things started happening. Three cheers for no-fault warranties!)

As you can see, I’m not totally clueless about Linux. I once knew a person who was something of a hobbyist and could do a decent job building a new home-use PC, however he looked at me straight-faced in ‘06 and asked “Who makes Linux? Didn’t Microsoft buy them?” I’m not that out of the loop. I can putter around in the terminal (partially helped by supporting about 40 Macs at one workplace) and definitely know how to RTFMan page and UTFGoogles.

Now, in 2011, I’ve decided that I need to become more fluent in an OS other than Windows. What caused this change in direction? An array of things building up over time, however recently it’s been due to me writing my competencies out for prospective clients and in the process I have to explain that I’m not competent enough with Linux to accept jobs that involve significant interaction with it. I don’t like the way that sounds. It doesn’t seem right for a SysAdmin generalist to count out a significant portion of possible machines to support. Saying I don’t know AIX or BeOS is one thing, but Linux isn’t a sidelined OS like those are.

Also, my grandmother’s laptop running Windows 7 was hosed with a rather nasty virus. She overnighted it cross-country to me to fix. I promptly installed Ubuntu 10.10 and in the process of setting it up I realized how sharp Ubuntu is. I also realized how familiar I was with the terminal and various Bash commands. I guess I absorbed more than I realized over the years. It was then that I realized that I could easily see myself using one of the more user friendly Linux distributions as my main OS.

So What’s the Problem?

My main problem is that I’m not sure what distribution to choose. I’ve narrowed it down to the following:

• Fedora 14 (That would get me familiar with an RPM based distro and perhaps I could parlay that familiarity onto studying for RedHat certs)
• CentOS 5.5 (RedHat without the Red Hat. If I went this direction, I’d have familiarity with the most popular enterprise Linux distro and be poised to get certified in it. It seems too good to be true. The downside is that I won’t be as bleeding edge as Fedora. Or is that a good thing?)
• Ubuntu 10.10 (All the cool kids are doing it!)
• Wait for Ubuntu 11 to drop in April (I’m so impatient. I want Linux now! Plus the new Gnome shell looks freaky.)
• Mint (Looks sharp, and it’s also mainstream so I’ll have good community support)
• Mint Debian (Same as above, except it’s a rolling distro so no major upgrades. Wewt!)

I’ve remove the following from my consideration

• Debian (I had too much trouble with the GNU-only nature of the OS a few years ago. I do like the rolling nature of it though. I remove this from consideration with grief. Maybe I’ll put it back on the list to consider if I find some compelling reason to.)
• Sabayon (Gentoo based, looks awesome and it’s rolling, but it’s not mainstream enough for a noob like me.)
• OpenSUSE 11 (SUSE was supported on my laptop model at one point. Drivers seemed to work great. However, after using it for a few days recently I noticed a lot of weird redraw errors in the desktop environment and it also didn’t see my LaCie 2Big hard drive. I’m also concerned about its future with Novell.)
• Gentoo (Maybe someday I’ll be cool enough to run Gentoo. Then, I will be rightly said to have arrived.)
• MEPIS (It looks like a fine distro, but I have no compelling reason to choose this over a more mainstream distro like Fedora or Ubuntu.)
• Mandriva, PCLOS, Linspire, etc. (Same as MEPIS)

I’ve also removed BSDs from consideration. That seems like a whole ‘nother can of worms I’m not ready to open up. Sorry @Obfuscurity and @Voretaq7.

There are two minor ussues that are further complicating my choice. Do I choose a rolling distribution or not? 64-bit or 32-bit?

The debate between choosing a rolling distribution or a rip-and-reload version design is causing me some consternation. Being a Windows person, I’m more accepting of the rip-and-reload method. However, the idea of never having to reinstall an OS to get the latest version is intriguing. Very intriguing. However, part of me knows that nothing is ever that simple. There are so few true rolling distros that the pickings are slim.

Once I decide on a distro, should I use the 32-bit or 64-bit edition? I’ve been running 64-bit windows for a while now and am happy to see continuing support for the platform. However, I’m not sure how that will complicate things in the Linux ecosystem. The fanatic in me wants to throw support behind the 64-bit platform. The pragmatist sits back and sips 32-bit milk.

Please Help Meh!

I’d appreciate any insights that you could give me about the major points to consider in a distribution. I know that in most scenarios people simple say “pick the distro that you’re most comfortable with”. Also, hardware compatibility is another consideration. My Dell XPS m1530 with an Nvidia m8600 GT seems to be well supported by Linux distros these days. So far, I think Fedora and Ubuntu are the top two contenders with Mint/LMDE as a third place option.

With any luck, I’ll be running a fine Linux distro by this time next week. That is, if I don’t have any more trashed partition tables, bombed Joomla installs and virus riddled family computers… but those are for entirely different blog posts.