Kirrily Robert has written to let me know that she’s declared this week to be “Sysadmin Week” over at the Perl Survey. If you’re a sysadmin, help out the Perl community by letting them know how you use it, it only takes around 5 minutes.

I only found out about this because someone noted that the patent is being challenged, but it looks like OpsWare is even more egregiously closed than I thought. Here’s the summary of the patent:

The patent — number 7,124,289 — covers the cornerstone of Opsware’s technology, the ability to automate the management of servers and network devices across a data center through model-based control. This innovation allows models of granular configuration information about servers or networks to be stored as records in a database and, as changes are made to any aspect of a systems configuration model, to push those changes to any relevant servers or network devices. This technique supports automation for even extremely large and global datacenters, and it provides a fast, efficient and cost-saving approach to ensuring consistency and compliance.

As described, this patent covers pretty much all of the configuration management tools out there. Just another reason to give no respect to OpsWare, I guess.

An OpsWare employee often tells me I should give them more credit when I complain about how bad the commercial companies are. I’m not fond of the products from either OpsWare of BladeLogic, although I haven’t used either of them extensively and haven’t looked at them in a while, but last I heard OpsWare considers their user guide to be proprietary and confidential. This clearly indicates a closed, fearful mindset, and I refuse to give respect to a company with that attitude, no matter the product set. It’d be easier to give these companies credit if they had anything other than whitepaper puff pieces on their sites.

Hullo. This is my first post on the O’Reilly sysadmin blog, and I’m about four months late. I told Mike Loukides I’d start blogging in November, and I’m just now getting around to it. It’s true that I run my own blog, but that’s mostly about the development of Puppet, and here I’ll be focusing more on the state of system administration and how we can maybe do better.

Incidentally, I’m the author of Puppet, a server automation framework. There are a few presentations online about Puppet, but the short summary is that I spent a few years developing and consulting, both on cfengine and on some of my own tools, and finally decided I could not take it any more, and figured I needed to either quit the field or create a tool I really wanted to use.

So, two years ago, Puppet was born, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Puppet is an ambitious project for me, because I’m really hoping to do more than create a decent tool, I want to redefine acceptable best practice in system administration. Cfengine is currently the “state of the art”, but it’s barely changed in 10 years and it’s only got one developer who isn’t even working on it full time. I want to do more than create a tool that’s better than cfengine, I want to prove that sysadmins can use open communities to build great open source tools, and I want to use our community to build a whole new generation of tools, not just one monolithic “does everything” tool.

If you want even more gory detail, you can read the interview just published by Computerworld Australia.

In the meantime, I’ll do my best to write often. I don’t really know what I’ll be blogging about here; it’ll definitely be part rant on the state of system administration, but I’d also like to help keep people abreast of what I learn and do (for the record, I’m now a full-time developer working on Puppet, and I haven’t been an operational sysadmin (thankfully) in a few years), and I will post on the events I go to and my experience trying to evangelize a better way to do system administration.

Just a reminder (or heads-up, for those who have not seen it before) - if you want to see the best security blogs in one place, just bookmark this RSS feed for a Security Bloggers Network on FeedBurner.

And, it goes without saying, that if do blog on infosec matters, you should join!

I use Ubuntu’s 6.06 TLS Desktop and Debian Sarge 3.1. I have also used Word 2000 for special cases especially when I need some language tools. Recently, I did a search for a thesaurus for Openoffice.org 2 and found a debian package called openoffice.org-thesaurus-sk_2.0.3-2_all.deb. It’s downloadable from here.

To my surprise, it loaded right away on my Ubuntu desktop and works nicely. Here’s the description from the Debian package site:

Openoffice.org is a full-featured office productivity suite that provides a near drop-in replacement for Microsoft(R) Office. This package contains an Slovak thesaurus for OpenOffice.org.

I thought I would pass this along since it works well and provides one more feature to bring Openoffice.org into the status of an industrial strength office productivity suite.

Curious, I started looking for the same thesaurus for other operating systems such as Windows and found this site called lingucomponent . You might check it out.

Fortunately, the Debian package provided me an English language version. I haven’t located one for other systems yet. If you know of one, you might let us know in the comments section.

Hopefully, you’ll find this information as useful as I did.

I wanted to highlight something very releavent for most sysadmins: SANS Log Management Summit, that will happen on July 12-13, 2006 in DC. The summit is subtitled “What Works in Log Management for Compliance, Operations and Security” and, from what I know, promises to be a very fun event!

Hello, readers. With great pleasure I introduce the revamped and reworked O’Reilly Network Sysadmin site. We’ve revised the site display to feature the knowledge, opinions, and wisdom of our expert webloggers as well as to give you better access to newer, fresher information.

Our goal is to update the site several times a week with new postings from our webloggers as well as original articles and links to useful information elsewhere.

We’re still in transition putting all of the pieces together (and gathering varied articles from several years of the O’Reilly Network to present in a meaningful and useful way), but we’ll have everything up and running in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to let us know what we’re doing right, where we can improve, which projects and authors to watch and to recruit in the comments section here, or by mailing me directly at chromatic@oreilly.com.

Thanks for reading!