The Random Ramblings of a Sysadmin

Yes indeed, my trusty 1998 Volvo V70 has recently seen a remarkable improvement in acceleration, with a very minor effort needed on my part. Actually, all I did was leave it at the authorized Volvo dealer in town, as it was time for the 240.000 km service anyway. For those who have little or no knowledge of the Volvo V70 service schedule, here's a quick run-down of the relevant parts of the checklist: Engine oil/filter Air filter Timing belt In addition to these three points, plenty of things are checked - none of them needed any attention in my case.

Today a server failed, and all data seemed lost. I was sent to the data centre to investigate, and to salvage what I could. After a pleasant three hour drive I was ready to get cracking. The server in question was set up to run linux software RAID, with LVM2 on top of the array. Booting was done from a manually sync'ed ext2 partition on both of the disks in the server. Not the ideal way of doing things, but usually quite ok for low-end solutions. Normally, we'd resolve a primary disk failure by booting from the secondary disk.

Never! Today I had the pleasurable experience of doing a remote upgrade on my server. Usually, remote upgrades on boxes with no LOM is a nail-biting edge-of-the-seat experience, not so when they're running OpenBSD - for me, at least. I started by fetching the source and building a new kernel, a step made necessary by my use of RAIDFrame with autoroot. Most people wouldn't need to build a new kernel. Then I installed the kernel and rebooted, untarred the 4.0 tarballs and followed the rest of the instructions from the OpenBSD FAQ.

Why oh why is the IT business full of incompetent idiot savages? Why do I have to explain the concept of TTL at least once a week, when the people I explain it to are supposed to be technically competent employees at internet-based businesses?

Well, yes - and no... Basically using blogging software enables me to update my site faster, which in turn means that I'll actually update it every now and then. Why English, I've been asked. Well, as most of what I'll be ranting about will be related to my line of work, and thus to Open Source software, it'll be a bit more helpful to people outside of Scandinavia. That's just about the only excuse I've got, and I'm sticking with it.