Boston, Massachusetts
SysAdmin
Areas of Expertise:
- sysadmin
- perl
- system administration
- network administration
- security
- creativity
- speaking
- training
- writing
Biography
Books
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(Blog
David N.'s blog posts are hosted at:
http://www.otterbook.com/blog/
http://www.otterbook.com/blog/
But It’s Only A Slash: svn.access
September 11 2009
I spent the good part of my morning today debugging an issue with a user’s access to a Subversion repository/trac service we provide. That person could not get even a basic svn checkout to work as expected. It would keep throwing errors like this: Server sent unexpected return value (403 Forbidden)… read moreAugust 24 2009
We just purchased a few new phones to replace our aging tin cans on a string at home. On the sage advice of some other techies I know, we purchased a few phones based on the DECT standard. IMHO, one of the coolest things about the DECT phones is they… read morePiracy, the Sincerest Form of Flattery?
August 24 2009
Well, I think the book has hit the big time because I randomly stumbled on not one, not two, but four separate places where people had uploaded my book to some of the grey matter (both kinds) sharing sites. In particular, there’s a Thai-speaking user whose been very busy being… read moreFixing the SQLite DB for a Trac Instance
August 20 2009
’bout time I add some sysadmin content here. If you ever have a trac instance go boom with an error like “DatabaseError: database disk image is malformed” you can often fix the problem by doing an sqlite dump/reload: $ cd /path/to/trac-sqlite-db-directory # find the trac.db file $ su www-data # switch to… read moreJuly 31 2009
If you’ve read Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions1 you’ll recall that one of the things that is a lot harder than it looks to get right using regexps is extracting the content from within some text-delimited string, especially when there are opening and closing delimiters2. Text::Balanced originally by Damian Conway and… read moreJuly 28 2009
Today’s interesting Perl module of the Day: Devel::Deprecate by Curtis “Ovid” Poe. Back in 2000, I started teaching a class called “Perl Saves the Day: Writing Small Perl Programs to Get Out of Big SysAdmin Pinches” which was essentially a class about Perl hacks and how to use them responsibly in System… read moreJuly 13 2009
Kudos goes to Thomas Leyer of Germany for finding the very first typo in the printed version of the book. Books like these have an amazing amount of detail so it is not uncommon for a few small things to slip through (in this case it was a single missing… read moreJune 16 2009
I’m thrilled and delighted to announce that Automating System Administration with Perl, the second edition of the semi-famed Otter Book (the book formerly known as Perl for System Administration) has been published by O’Reilly Media. The Otter Book is available now in paper and electronic form. Be sure to get your copy… read moreAlso find David N. on:
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