David Both to have book signing at ATO
I've just completed arrangements to do a book signing at the All Things Open (ATO) conference this year. I don't yet know when I'll be...
Disk Disaster
Sometimes you're fortunate enough to be on the periphery of an IT disaster and not the cause of it. Even so it can be excruciatingly...
Three surprising reasons I like the Cinnamon desktop
I wrote about my five reasons to like Cinnamon back in April, and in the time since, I've found even more reasons to like and...
My worst self-inflicted IT disaster
I've managed to stuff up many times over the more than 50 years I've worked in IT and computer related jobs. Many times it was...
The Perfect Programmer
August 10, 2014 I found this little bit of poetry in a pile of very old documents I was sorting through today. It was printed...
Using a Live USB for Linux recovery
Over the years I've managed to need recovery mode quite a few times. Most of those instances were self-inflicted and provided me with many learning...
Getting Started with SELinux
SELinux was developed by the NSA to provide a highly secure computing environment. True to the GPL, they have made this code available to the rest of the Linux community and it is included as part of nearly every mainstream distribution.
About those livesys error messages
Do you see error messages about livesys and livesys-late on the console and in the systemd journal like those in Figure 1? Jul 10 21:38:33...
Fedora Repo issues during updates
As I've been doing updates the last few days, I've noticed a problem with random systems where DNF5 indicates that no updates are available when...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 24—Reality Bytes
Author’s note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 26 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with significant changes to update some...
How to fix unresolvable file conflict errors upgrading or installing software RPMs
I install updates on a pretty regular basis and -- most of the time -- they install without a problem. By updates I mean installation...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 23—Support your Favorite Open Source Project
Author’s note: This article is excerpted in part from chapter 25 of my book, The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, with significant changes to update the...
Short report on the Perl / Raku Conference
This past weekend I attended the Perl / Raku conference in Greenville, SC, USA. It was a great weekend as I met a couple old...
The Linux Philosophy for SysAdmins, Tenet 22—Mentor the young SysAdmins
When I first started, I was a young and innocent SysAdmin. I was fortunate because I worked at a couple different jobs where other, seasoned SysAdmins were willing to mentor me and encourage me. None of them laughed at me when I asked what must have seemed to them to have answers that were blindingly obvious. None of these patient SysAdmins ever told me to RTFM.
Strange problems with switches
Network switches are supposed to be simple devices that work at TCP/IP layer 1, the hardware layer. As far as the network is concerned, and...
Website problems circumvented
We had a problem with the Both.org website this morning. After a bit of problem determination I discovered that the WordPress theme we're using seems...