For the past few months, my department has been a pawn in a varity of
political games. This has effectively derailed or delayed every project I
was working on or would have started at the end of the spring semester.
About three weeks ago, decisions were made, changes were coming. I was
faced with the prospect of having to assist in the dismantling of the
technical infrastructure I had built up. Once finished with that, I would
be left with a very different set of duties than I had been doing over the
last two years.
No longer would I would be the person making all (or even most) of the
technical decisions. No longer would I be able to dabble in every aspect
of IT. No longer would I be researching and developing the policy.
Worse than all that though, was that I would be asked to do work that
didn't interest me intellectually.
With encouragement and assistance from a good friend, an opportunity
was presented to me that my wife and I were unable to pass up; a job that
would be a challenge, in a land of nearly perpetually nice weather. So
with less than 3 weeks notice, I find myself leaving America's Dairyland
and heading for Silicon Valley.
This of course means that I am leaving the happy-go-lucky world of
academic freedom and entering the world of non-disclosure agreements.
What this means for this blog is yet to be worked out. I would expect to
continue to be able to continue to write the types of pieces I have been
writing. There will definitely be a break for awhile as I find my feet in
a new job and in a new city.
As I tweak various bits on the blog, I thought I should share what all
makes this blog go. The webserver is Apache running on Solaris on Sun hardware with an UltraSPARC processor. The blog
software is Blosxom.
Tangent: Now Blosxom hasn't really actively been
developed since 2003. And the
authormigrated
away from the package in early 2006. I don't let such things bother me
though, as I am used to choosing software packages and products that aren't
really the most popular or mainstream.
There is however an active User Group, Yahoo group, and a SourceForge Group.
Now blosxom is a darned simple package, less than 400 lines of perl
parsing text files in a simple directory structure. That simplicity is
part of what attracted me to the package, but it does mean I have a few plugins to add or refine
various features.
categorytree: This provides the category list on the right.
flatarchives: This plugin provides the archive list on the right.
preview: A plugin that provides a way for me to see posts on the blog that I am working on, without showing those posts to the general public.
strip_unix_comments: I use unix style comments in my entries to put various meta data for my own benefit. It wouldn't be bad if the public saw them, but they are really only beneficial to me.
date_fullname: A simple plugin that provides templates with the full month name.
flavourdir: Allows me to put my flavour files (the templates used for the html and rss versions of this page) in a different folder than the default.
imagesizer: This plugin automatically puts in the height and width tags for images.
I have been suprised at the number of people that have gone to the trouble of finding an email address for me to provide comments and compliments about various entries. So I suppose I should provide an easily accessible address.
So consider this an invitation to email me with comments, criticisms, and what not about this blog. The email address is sysadmin followed by the @ sign, with the domain "fief.org" after it.
I apologize for the annoyance of presenting my email address this way, but spammers are doing their best to make email useless, and I must fight back to keep my email a useful communication tool.
The title on my Position Description (PD) is Associate Information
Processing Consultant. That's what my business cards say. I call
myself Systems Administrator. I handle pretty much everything computer
related for about 85 machines (which includes a 50 seat computer lab)
and 8 staff members. The workstations and desktops are all Windows
based (2k at the time of this writing). The servers are a collection
of win2k server, w2k3 server, and Redhat Enterprise Linux derivatives
(Tao and Whitebox at the moment).
This blog will hopefully become; a collection of interesting tricks,
lessons learned, results of research into products or problems, and
other technical tidbits from my life as a sysadmin. Hopefully it will
be useful to others.
So I'm starting a blog. I could write my own software. This wouldn't
unreasonable as the rest of my site is maintained with custom perl code
using Mason. But seeing as how I
have enough projects on my plate (at both work and home), adding another
seemed like a bad idea.
A bunch of my friends (seemingly all of them actually) have blogs of
some sort. Most of them use a hosted blogging package (like LiveJournal or Blogger. This wasn't an option as I
wanted it hosted on my own site. Of self-hosted blogging packages WordPress and MovableType are both used
by a couple of my friends. Some research was required.
