Blog Questions Challenge 2025
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
3w ago
Thanks to Ben Cotton for sharing. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I covered a lot of that in 20 years of this nonsense from about a year ago. The quick version is I was charged with ..read more
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Incident response process for the big stuff
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
1M ago
Back in November I posted about how to categorize your incidents using the pick-one list common across incident automation platforms. In that post I said: A few organizations go so far as to have a fully separate process for the ..read more
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The power of columnar databases for telemetry
Sysadmin1138
by SysAdmin1138
3M ago
"Columnar databases store data in columns, not rows," says the definition. I made a passing reference to the technology in Software Telemetry, but didn't spend any time on what they are and how they can help telemetry and observability. Over ..read more
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Incident response programs
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
3M ago
Honeycomb had a nice post where they describe dropping a priority list of incident severities in favor of an attribute list. Their list is still a pick-one list; but instead of using a 1-4 SEV scale, they're using a list ..read more
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Rust and the Linux kernel
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
5M ago
One of the kernel maintainers made social waves by bad mouthing Rust and the project to rebuild the Linux kernel in Rust. The idea of rebuilding the kernel in "Rust: the memory-safe language" not "The C in CVE stands for ..read more
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Getting people to think about disaster recovery
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
7M ago
SysAdmins have no trouble making big lists of what can go wrong and what we're doing to stave that off a little longer. The tricky problem is pushing large organizations to take a harder look at systemic risks and taking them seriously. I mean, the big companies have to have disaster recovery (DR) plans for compliance reasons; but there are a lot of differences between box-ticking DR plans and comprehensive DR plans. Any company big enough to get past the running out of money is the biggest disaster phase has probably spent some time thinking about what to do if things go wrong. But how do you ..read more
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Correcting a non-compliant team's reliability
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
8M ago
In a Slack I'm on someone asked a series of questions that boil down to: Our company has a Reliability team, but another team is ignoring SLA/SLO obligations. What can SRE do to fix this? I got most of the way through a multi-paragraph answer before noticing my answer was, "This isn't SRE's job, it's management's job." I figured a blog post might help explain this stance better. The genius behind the Site Reliability Engineer concept at Google is they figured out how to make service uptime and reliability matter to business management. The mathematical framework behind SRE is all about quant ..read more
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The year of the enterprise Linux desktop
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
8M ago
will never happen more than once at a company. I say this knowing that chunks of Germany's civil infrastructure managed to standardize on SuSE desktops, and some may still be using SuSE. Some might view this as proof it can be done, I say that Linux desktops not spreading beyond this example is proof of why it didn't happen. The biggest reason we have the German example is because the decision was top down. Government decision making is different than corporate decision making, which is why we're not going to see the same thing happen, a Linux desktop (actually laptop) mandate from on high ..read more
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Why tcp-mss-clamp still matters
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
9M ago
This is blogging in anger after fighting this over the weekend. Because I'm like that I have a backup cable ISP in case my primary fiber ISP flakes out. I work from home, so the existence of internet is critical to me getting paid, and neither cell phone has good enough service to hotspot reliably. Thus, having two ISPs. It's expensive, but then so would be missing work for a week while I wait for a cable tech to come out to diagnose why their stuff isn't working. The backup ISP hasn't been working well for a while, but the network card pointing to the second cable modem flaked out two weeks a ..read more
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20 years of this nonsense
Sysadmin1138 Blog
by SysAdmin1138
10M ago
20 years ago today I published the first post to this blog. It was a non-sequitur post because I didn't want my first post to be "is this thing on?" or similar. I had to look up what the Exchange worm I mentioned was, and it was probably MyDoom. That was a mass mailing worm, because this was before anti-virus was a routine component of email setups. I started a blog because I needed something to host on this new "web pages from your home directory" feature I was asked to create, and this was the first content on that project! I needed something to look at to prove it worked, and having externa ..read more
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