Me

Upgrade complete

published on Mon, 12/12/2011 - 22:25

Sorry for the reposting on the RSS feed, I was migrating to a new server, upgrading to Drupal 7, and getting Varnish setup.  Things seem to be running well now.  This blog is not dead -- stay tuned for some new content.

Lead SysAdmin position available

published on Wed, 04/06/2011 - 16:32

There's a blog post to follow with when/why, etc., but without further ado:

I'm moving to a new position at Buckle, and that means we need a new Lead SysAdmin.  It's a great job at a great company, in a great place to raise a family (Kearney, NE).  You get paid well, get a good yearly budget for new toys equipment, and it's overall a very fun position.

My Thoughts and Ramblings on DrupalConSF 2010

published on Fri, 04/23/2010 - 21:15

I had the great pleasure of attending my first DrupalCon this week.  Held in downtown San Francisco at the Moscone Center, it was my opinion that this was Drupal's "homecoming".  While Drupal wasn't "born" in San Francisco, it seems to be the city that has the strongest following.  The attendance numbers didn't lie - I'm pretty sure they broke 3,000 geeks attendees.  I made this trip solo -- I only knew three people that were going, and those three were only acquaintances I'd met via email/IM a few months before.  When I left, I didn't come home with "leads" or "contacts", I came home with friends and role models, many of whom I plan on staying in touch with.  I met most of the authors of the Drupal books I've read, associated faces to the podcasts and RSS feeds I subscribe to, and I even had the opportunity to quickly say thanks to Dries and shake his hand.

For those who didn't know, archive.org has made the sessions available for download, so be sure to check those out.  Read on for my "takeaways" from DCSF2010.

2010: What a Year!

published on Tue, 04/20/2010 - 09:28

If you would have told me 5 years ago that:

  1. Sun would be gone
  2. I would take personal time off from work to attend DrupalCon (and not regret it)
  3. I would attend a Microsoft party

I would have told you where to shove it. Well:

For all those wondering, I went to the party as a saboteur on a mission: to drink as much as I could to try and directly impact their bottom line. Mission accomplished :)

Good times @ DCSF2010!

Ask SAJ: Any SA's at DrupalConSF?

published on Sun, 04/18/2010 - 10:50

It snuck up on me so fast, I forgot to ask - are any of my SysAdmin's Journey readers going to San Franciso for DrupalCon? If so, contact me, and we'll see if we can meet up for a beer! I'm posting this from DIA, so if you happen to be here and want to grab a bite to eat, ping me. I'm flying out to SF at about 12:30pm MDT.

Sysadmin Humor

published on Mon, 02/22/2010 - 09:12

I laughed out loud when I saw this XKCD comic this morning:

I'm Not Dead Yet!!!

published on Wed, 11/11/2009 - 23:18

Contrary to the lack of posts on my blog, I'm still alive. I apologize for not writing much, but things have been so busy lately.

At $work, I'm working on rolling out a forklift upgrade in a lab environment that involves:

  • Upgrade our application servers from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10.
  • Upgrade Java from 1.4.2 to 5. Yes, I know that 5 is already EOL, but our API vendor runs on Weblogic 9, which is constrained to Java 5.
  • Speaking of Weblogic, upgrade that from 8.1 to 9.2.
  • Upgrade our ecommerce API from version 6.x to 10.x
  • Upgrade our Apache frontends from 2.0 to 2.2 - Done!
  • Implement a couple of Nginx boxes as a static HTTP servers, allowing our Apache servers to focus proxying and URL rewriting.

All of this of course needs to happen in parallel with the normal firefighting ;-) Oh, and I'm trying to get Puppet up and running in the lab in all my free time.

On the other hand at $home, I've been doing a lot of work with Drupal. I'm working on designing a photography site for a friend. Heck, I've even had some code committed to the node gallery contrib module!

I've got two books I've yet to crack open, Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual, and Pro Drupal Development. I'm trying to read through Pro Git, and Pulling Strings with Puppet.

All of this productivity came to a screeching halt last Friday, when I got my Motorola Droid. The best part about my HTC running Windows Mobile was that it kept me in the dark about how fricking cool a real smartphone can be!

As part of my new addiction to my phone, I caved in and signed up for a Facebook account -- don't worry, I didn't give them my email password, so no one will get any spam. Feel free to hit me up though! I have to admit, the sheer number of users is impressive; but it's the percentage of those that are actively using it every day that is incredible.

So, stay tuned. There's a lot of good posts coming - book reviews, a Droid/Android review (with an SA POV of course), and who knows, maybe some Drupal related stuff.

CheckPoint UTM-1 vs Cisco ASA in an ECommerce Setting

published on Thu, 10/15/2009 - 09:22

Recently at $WORK, we had to come up with budget proposals for next year.  We knew that we were going to outgrow our current Checkpoint UTM appliances by holiday next year, so we had to buy new hardware.  We just had to decide which hardware.  While I'm capable of building a Linux/*BSD firewall on my own, I frankly don't have the time to mess around with updates and compliance documentation.  We need an appliance, and for our needs, Cisco and CheckPoint are about the

Happiness is *NOT*...

published on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 23:36

No happiness here!I bit the bullet and jumped on a sweet deal on a latest-gen 17" MacBook Pro late last week. It was a refurb, and I was too cheap to pay for quick shipping, so Apple told me it wouldn't ship for 5-7 business days. Whatdya know, they were on-the ball and shipped it out early. It arrived at my desk on Monday. Normally this would be good except that I'm almost 400 miles away from my desk, and won't be back until Friday! Arrrggghhh!

The Problem with Web-based Everything

published on Thu, 06/11/2009 - 08:29

So, I've been tinkering with the free version of Toodledoo - a web-based GTD task manager, and I was thinking about upgrading to a "pro" account. Unfortunately, they had a storm run through last night, which engaged the generators. When the generators kicked in, something didn't work right, and power was lost. This in turn caused a database crash, which caused it to corrupt, and they are still down now.

Pages

Subscribe to SysAdmin's Journey RSS