Life of a sysadmin

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65410582618645247792011-04-21T18:13:10.184-04:00Life of a sysadminThe day-to-day life of a *nix sysadmin. From installing, to configuring, to helpful hints, this blog gives an inside look to what it's like living the Admin Life.Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.comBlogger101100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-24211663739934041432007-09-27T16:52:00.000-04:002007-11-28T00:04:34.984-05:00A Macintosh for me?

One of my friends who works for a school board has offered to send me their used Macintosh computers. Of course I accepted; I've always wanted to have my own Mac.The problem is shipping. Apparently these are the older Power Macintosh clamshells, so they are hefty. They're also a tad old (300MHz for the best), but I don't really care; an old Mac is better than no Mac.Plus, I can finally try out

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-47236125528139976072007-09-24T21:52:00.000-04:002007-11-27T23:48:48.853-05:00Finally, the camera is to be repaired.

It's been a long time coming, but I finally was able to call Canon Customer Service, and spoke with a friendly David, who gave me a service call / RMA # for my digital camera. It will be nice to be able to take pictures again.I'm also still enjoying reading the UNIX book. It's quite amazing what I've been missing; I'm really glad I decided to purchase it.

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-32845728108980407882007-09-24T02:20:00.000-04:002007-11-27T23:44:42.604-05:00Ah, a relief.

First off, I'm reading a book entitled "UNIX: A Visual QuickStart Guide". It's a little noobish in tone, but even I am learning things out of it. I'm quite enjoying becoming even more powerful with the CLI. I had no idea how powerful awk was. You learn something new every day.Meanwhile, the relief comes in the fact that I washed my car. Not really admin-related, but it needed to be done, and

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-56708245113447952652007-09-20T18:07:00.000-04:002007-11-27T23:38:24.853-05:00Debian breaks in mysterious ways.

/me blows dust clumps off the blog.Sorry for such a delay in making a new post. I've been terribly busy, but thankfully the computer systems are running fine...Except for one of my friend's MacBook. He wanted to install Debian on it so that he could have a Linux machine, but apparently Debian doesn't like his machine; more specifically, his network controller.The problem isn't that Debian

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-14163509614566075032007-08-22T18:54:00.000-04:002007-09-30T22:16:26.199-04:00OpenOffice renders documents better than MS Office

I was having a terrible time trying to do a complex product catalog using Microsoft Word 2003 on my Windows laptop. I was unaware that OpenOffice.org had a version of their software that would run on Windows xp.I downloaded it, installed it, and opened my Word document with the OOo Writer. My document not only looked better, but it actually understood the formatting that I used and rendered it

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-40396337897917346322007-08-21T03:10:00.000-04:002007-08-27T03:13:15.758-04:00I got my lappy back!

After the whole floppy disk fiasco, I considered wiping the disk and installing Windows 95 from the old 30 floppy set I have. Imagine my surprise when I realised I left the Windows xp CD in the disc drive, and it began to boot!As fast as I could type, I ran FIXBOOT from the recovery console. I am now writing this from my laptop! YAY! :DI'm incredibly excited! I am copying my important

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-85072403027261880622007-08-20T23:10:00.000-04:002007-08-27T03:10:43.372-04:00Windows setup doesn't work with USB.

My laptop is suffering from a corrupted Windows boot sector resulting from NetBSD's installer overwriting it during its setup program. The CD drive is also acting very strange; sometimes it isn't even recognised by the BIOS during POST (it seems to not be getting power), other times it is detected by POST but kicks out during boot up (causing a 60-second poll delay), and even other times, it

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-41729095687266733872007-08-13T16:01:00.000-04:002007-08-13T16:06:28.019-04:00Gentoo, part II

After multiple attempts at booting off the Live DVD that I received with a magazine, I finally figured out that it wasn't the laptop's buggy disc drive, it was the disc.Since I don't feel like downloading a 3.8 gigabyte ISO, I am just downloading the "minimal" disc image. Hopefully this will boot and install.

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-83328644880359333632007-08-12T02:09:00.000-04:002007-08-11T23:10:29.721-04:00Introduction

Hello.Welcome to my blog! This blog documents my life as a (primarily UNIX) Systems Administrator, or sysadmin. It can be challenging, but also rewarding.I primarily run Linux on workstations, and a BSD variant on servers, though I do still have a few Windows nodes left on my network. I generally lean towards NetBSD -- I find that it has better support for the hardware I use, and is extremely

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6541058261864524779.post-9494045475456869232007-08-11T23:36:00.000-04:002007-08-12T21:58:46.016-04:00Choosy Admins Choose Gentoo (?)

I've had a terrible experience trying to get WINE to work on my NetBSD laptop (network name WKST003). Apparently the memory layout is different than it is on Linux, and WINE developers have not yet fixed the bug.So I decided last night to install Gentoo on it. I have a 2007.0 DVD-ROM, so I decided to boot off of it. Bad idea. This laptop's disc drive (a QSI DVD-ROM from what I can gather) has

Ahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02480002748645639144noreply@blogger.com0