IT Architect, Trainer, Writer/Editor
Areas of Expertise:
- Infrastructure Architecture
- Linux
- LDAP
- DNS
- DHCP
- NIS
- SSH
- System hardening
- Monitoring
- Logging
- SQL optimization
- Apache
- MySQL
- Python
- Perl
- PHP
- consulting
- speaking
- programming
- training
- writing
Biography
Books
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Blog
Recent Posts | All Posts
The Cloud, OSCON, and the Future of Systems Administration
July 29 2008
I had a really fantastic time at OSCON this year. When I went to OSCON in 2006, I was a little put off by the fact that there seemed to be very little focus on systems administration, and meanwhile systems... read moreLoghetti: an apache log file filter in Python
March 18 2008
As announced earlier on my personal blog, I launched an open source project on Google Code called "loghetti". It's written in Python, and is a foundation for what I hope will become a very flexible tool to help admins (myself included) get... read moreA Command Line Interface to Google Spreadsheets
November 01 2007
A few people who read my blog are already aware that I was working on a little pet project to develop a command line interface to a Google Spreadsheets document that is being used by some of the administrative operations team at Python Magazine. The long and short of it… read morePython for Sysadmin Work Gaining Momentum
July 17 2007
I am so incredibly pleased to learn that two of my fellow O’Reilly bloggers are about to become fellow O’Reilly book authors as well. I had been secretly hoping I could learn Python fast enough to work on Python for Systems Administrators myself, but as usual, smarter folks won the… read moreMay 22 2007
I work in academia. I’m a sysadmin. However, I took a rather non-traditional route to sysadmin-hood. The very brief version of the story goes like this: I started as a lowly database reporting geek. I found that I liked databases, and the database guys took me under their wing and… read moreSys Admins, Books, and Trending
May 01 2007
Mike Hendrickson posted a chart showing what looks like a downward trend in sales of books to systems folks. I was not shocked by the chart. I was not shocked to see admin books falling off a bit. I *was* shocked to see that there are people within O’Reilly, people… read moreRetiring the Personal Analog Assistant
March 04 2007
If you’re not managing your time, it’s almost guaranteed that you’re misusing it. I’ve heard, and even used, tons of excuses in the past to not manage my time, but eventually you’ll come to the realization that saying you don’t have time to figure out a system to manage your… read moreFebruary 19 2007
I’m lucky to be in a position where I am not forced to specialize on a single technology. I have always made a habit of keeping up with the job market, and it seems the trend is that the bigger the company you wind up at, the more likely you… read moreFebruary 14 2007
I originally posted this on my blog, but thought the broader sysadmin community could benefit from the discussion: Somebody on a mailing list asked a question about shell quoting. The quoting issue would not have been so difficult had it not been for the fact that it was a command… read moreFebruary 11 2007
There’s a lot of good, interesting discussion happening on this blog as of late. The state of system administration tools, in general, is pretty poor. “Taking care of business” is still very dependent on the ingenuity and creativity of the individual administrator. Maybe being able to be creative is one… read moreHow are you syncing files across systems?
October 30 2006
So I’ve been taking an informal poll of the sysadmins I know to find out how people are managing the synchronization of files across a server farm. Looks like there are three popular ways of handling this, which I’ll list in no particular order: First, there’s NFS. There are numerous… read moreI'm slowly being seduced by Python
Ok, so I’m not completely sold yet. I still have a boatload of Perl code floating about, and for certain things I’m still writing *new* Perl code. However, I was coerced into using Python for a project I’m working on, and I have to say that I think Python is… read more
I’ve seen more than a couple of sites in the past where there are teams of administrators who work together to maintain the system and/or network infrastructure, or the data management infrastructure, or whatever. On these teams there’s often a lot of task overlap even when the team is made… read more
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