Ah, a new year, with old systems. If you recently took time off to relax with friends and family and ring in 2014, perhaps you're feeling rejuvenated and ready to break bad old habits and develop good new ones.
Annual Fund letter from the USENIX Co-Executive Directors:
This week we posted our official USENIX LISA '13 conference videos and photos. For your browsing pleasure, I've created this streamlined clickable list.
In 2010, Joyent's Brendan Gregg gave his first USENIX LISA conference talk. He says he didn't feel qualified to give the talk, but a colleague encouraged him to submit the proposal, Visualizations for Performance Analysis (and More).
When I started working for my current employer, I had experience with CFEngine2 and a dabbling in Puppet. Unfortunately for me, my new job used Chef. I thought I'd give myself an opportunity to learn it better by using it to configure my server and laptop at home. But I was in a hurry to get things configured and ended up using something that I perceived as having a shorter start time.
Tom Limoncelli has taught many excellent courses at LISA over the years, so when I saw he was teaching a new course called "Evil Genius 101" I was intrigued. Fellow blogger Matt Simmons described the course as "how to win friends and coerce people", and that was fairly apt. Okay, "coerce" is probably a little strong.
On Tuesday morning, Joshua Jensen presented a introduction to continuous integration (CI) with Jenkins. Although CI is generally considered a part of the development process, it it has relevance to system administration. I can think of several occasions where a simple build that checked CFEngine syntax before deploying the change across clusters would have saved several hours of effort.
Monday afternoon, Adam Moskowitz taught his "Getting to Senior: Sysadmin Level IV and Beyond" course to a near-capacity crowd. As expected, the audience consisted mostly of mid-level admins looking to position themselves for career advancement.