I am such a dork
June 4, 2009
Yes, that was my real reputation score when I logged into serverfault.com this evening. The masses agree 
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Standalone Sysadmin
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Archives
- ▼2010 (104)
- ▼September (3)
- ▶August (10)
- Conference News (LISA and PICC and more!)
- On the road again...
- My take on DevOps
- Ohio Linux Fest is coming up in Columbus, OH!
- Great tips on server rack filling
- Cobbler or just straight kickstart for VMware ESXi?
- Xenophobia and Elitism in the Community
- Go to VMworld for free!
- Infrastructure Upgrades: Serious Business
- SysAdmin Appreciation Day Recap and Addendum
- ▶July (8)
- Thank you.
- Etsy Now Sponsoring SysAdmin Appreciation Day Event in NYC!
- If the sysadmin of the year is for good work...
- 1 week to SysAdmin Appreciation Day
- Replacement Dell PowerEdge R410 Motherboards Compromised
- Introduction to SNMP
- Progress report and vacation next week
- My company has several open positions...
- ▶June (15)
- Two SysAdmin Appreciation Day Events (now with West Coast action!)
- Introducing the LISA10 Blogging Team!
- Last day for OpenDNS SysAdmin of the Year Contest
- Why don't we buy sysadmin books anymore?
- Apparently I'm going to LinuxCon 2010 in Boston
- Documentation for the client's benefit
- I must be getting soft in my old age
- Setting unix file permissions numerically
- Charging for system resources?
- Mailing list for group leaders
- 2010 SysAdmin of the Year Contest
- MeetUp Ban Reason Comes Out!
- Go to VMworld on the cheap
- Africa's roles in technology
- Update on SysAdmin Day Meetup
- ▶May (14)
- SysAdmin Appreciation Day on Meetup.com
- Article in ;login:
- Hypertext and the web alters our brains
- SysAdmin Calendar
- SysAdmin Appreciation Day: 2010
- XenClient: Baremetal Desktop Virtualization
- Local yum repositories
- Longshot: Lost Nikon D50 in Washington DC
- Blogging Position Available: USENIX LISA 2010 - San Jose
- It's my blogiversary!
- What lengths do you go to in order to recover lost data?
- Help LOPSA give back to the community
- PICC overview, Nagios slides, and the near future
- Puppet, PICC, and more updates
- ▶April (11)
- Sleep Deprivation? More like an overabundance of consciousness
- NJ SysAdmin Conference: $99 if you're unemployed
- The future of storage technology
- IT Centric Flickr Groups
- Analyzing I/O Performance at cmdln.org
- New USENIX blog posted
- Lets talk about this conference thing...
- Yes, backups still suck...and here's why
- Dell reverses position on 3rd party drives
- First day of Tech Field Day
- Tech Field Day Preview: VKernel
- ▶March (21)
- Tech Field Day Preview: HP
- Tech Field Day Preview / Overview
- Small Infrastructure, meet the Enterprise
- Back from PostgreSQL East
- Hello from PostgreSQL East
- Last Chance for Discount at Sysadmin Conference
- Culture of Quitting?
- NJ SysAdmin Conference Early Bird Extended
- Switch Speed and Price - Tradeoffs
- Blog Upgraded and Fixed
- Unteachable Disaster Recovery
- Anyone else headed to PostgreSQL East?
- The woes of a small infrastructure admin...
- Back to our normally scheduled blog posts
- Flashback: Burnout and the toll it takes
- Flashback: Infrastructure Upgrades through Forest Fires
- Flashback: DNS names for internal hosts
- Flashback: HOWTO: Punch down blocks for in-building wiring
- PICC - Please Come Speak!
- Flashback: HOWTO: Racks and Rackmounting
- When Blog Entries Ruled the Earth...
- ▶February (11)
- Pacific Tsunami Alert
- NJ/NY/PA/DE Regional Sysadmin Conference
- Devotion to Duty (xkcd)
- Do you have any idea what you're doing?
- Dell Removes 3rd Party Drive Support
- Standalone Sysadmin mentioned in Mind of Root
- Gestalt IT's Tech Field Day: I'm in!
- "SysAdmin Talk" Blog Live
- The fun of dealing with bandwidth vendors
- Hurry if you're considering a CompTIA certification
- Spreading the word about the NJ Community Conference
- ▶January (11)
- Sysadmins aren't (necessarily) programmers, they're people who can program
- What is Cat5e?
- Administering Users in Linux via CLI
- New Jersey area community conference!
- Review of LISA '09 in Linux Pro Magazine
- Sharing Google Reader items
- It's not what you know...
- Bandwidth++
- Well, that was a thrilling exercise...
- Each of us is a little bit like a gravity well...
- Introspection, Collar Codes, and IT's Place in Business
- ▶2009 (218)
- ▶December (16)
- Extending Mediawiki for all your sysadmin needs
- Rack Area Networking? But what if all you've got is a rack?
- 10 IT Management Predictions
- Are there blue collar and white collar admins?
- How did you become a sysadmin?
- SysAdmin Professionalism Survey
- Spotting Valuable Candidates
- Providing the tenants are of light build and relatively sedentary...
- Oracle says MySQL is safe and sound
- Technorai Claim Code - Don't Click Me!
- Introduction to Enterprise Storage
- My Sysadvent Calendar Entry is up!
- Coding Horrors? No kidding!
- Slow progress with rsyslog is still progress
- Maintenance mode, aka "fix your muckups"
- Happenings all over the net!
- ▶November (14)
- Syngergy-plus for sharing inputs
- Subscribed Blogs: Now with OPML Goodness
- Windows 7: (Probably) My Future User Platform
- Puzzles -vs- Mysteries
- Reminder: SysAdvent Calendar coming soon!
- Interview with Pam Howell for LOPSA
- No time for an update - Links instead
- It's going to get cold soon...
- Something needs to be done!
- Back to our regularly scheduled administration
- Windows Identical SIDs: Not as bad as we thought?
- Returned from LISA09!
- Blogging from the LISA Conference!
- Did you remember to set your clocks back?
- ▶October (15)
- Please schedule your unplanned emergencies at a more opportune time
- Please allow us to automate your virtual cloud environment...
- Dedupe to tape: Are you crazy?
- Sysadmins and Egos: Great in pairs!
- Secure? I think I've got a firewall...
- Scotty Time: A guilty indulgence?
- Short questions get long answers, sometimes
- My Interview with Tom Limoncelli
- Much (more) ado about SSL
- SSL Enabled for the blog
- List of my subscribed RSS feeds
- Sysadmin of the Year - Are you a Rockstar?
- Tape Encryption Best Practices
- Aprigo Selected as Microsoft Startup of the Day
- Network Diagramming Resouce
- ▶September (16)
- I'm going to LISA!
- VM Live Migration is the wrong tactic
- How much are those upgrades?
- The importance of community
- Hiring System Administrators
- FCoE Discussion
- I have too many black boxes
- My old nemesis, bandwidth
- Backup Obligations
- Does your datacenter have a plug?
- Call for bloggers
- Hello Sun Visitors!
- Listening to podcasts takes time
- Modern uptime - measured from the outside in
- New testing environment for my users
- Training is different from the other side!
- ▶August (14)
- Desktop Hardware Problems
- The New Admin Has Arrived!
- The Future of System Administration
- Old news - Linux local root vulnerability
- Quick blurb on backups and Amanda
- Great article on good sysadmin teams
- Setting up a print server
- A strong case for IPv6
- Blogaversaries Galore!
- A User's View of Security
- Happy Blogiversary to Tech Talk
- A collection of amusing pictures...
- Interesting concept on the Aprigo blog
- Weekend Update: Sysadmin Meetup and CentOS
- ▶July (27)
- Reflections on SysAdmin Appreciation Day
- Giveaways at the Meetup
- As a CentOS user, I find the recent news disturbing...
- UPDATE ON SYSADMIN DAY MEETUP
- Changing the Windows XP default user profile
- Overselling services in the datacenter
- WAN Acceleration: What options are available?
- FYI for you job hunters
- Aprigo NINJA Giveaway
- CentOS Wiki - Hardening CentOS Guide
- Nagios Configuration HOWTO
- Great howto on Cacti
- Do we communicate with and support our users?
- Great books I've been reading
- New Top Level Domain information released
- If you can't script it, use a checklist
- I am my own worst enemy sometimes
- SysAdmin Meetup in New York City
- Did the Slingbox suddenly become passe?
- More press for my article
- Is Apache the new Firefox?
- Hilarious server room cooling story
- VMWare ESXi - Decreasingly Free As Time Goes On
- Aaaaand we're back...
- Welcome to the future!
- Update with the hiring and an upcoming blog update
- New Article: Manage Stress Before It Kills You
- ▶June (19)
- Fun with VMware ESXi
- Encryption tools for Sysadmins
- Welcome to the future!
- Enable Terminal Server on a remote machine
- Windows Desktop Automated Installations
- Examine SSL certificate on the command line
- More Cable Management
- The Backup Policy: Databases
- Link What is LDAP?
- Today, on a very special Standalone Sysadmin...
- Opsview->Nagios - Is simpler better?
- Authenticating OpenBSD against Active Directory
- Ah, the pitter patter of new equipment....
- General update and a long weekend ahead
- I am such a dork
- Future Tech I want to try out
- Switching from piecemeal machines to leases
- Update: The storage gods heard my lament
- The god of storage hates me, I know it
- ▶May (16)
- Outstanding new sysadmin resource
- Software Deployment in Windows, courtesy of Admin Arsenal
- Followup to slow SAN speed
- SAN performance issues with the new install
- Monitor Dell Warranty
- That was a well needed break
- Ouch.
- Security is a process and not plug&play
- Happy 1st Blogiversary!
- Obtaining the WWPN of fibre channel HBAs
- Quick blurb: Nagios is forked
- NVidia's Tesla C1060 - The FM principle?
- Learning
- Wahoo! 500+ Subscribers!
- Resizing storage LUNs in Linux on the fly
- Random thoughts on Slashdot
- ▶April (18)
- Finally, I have a Safari subscription!
- Progressing towards a true backup site
- The Goodwill Computer Store in Houston, TX
- APC Data Center University
- Discussion on /. - Should cables be replaced?
- My trouble with bonded interfaces
- Sysadmin Aphorisms
- I see in my future...
- And you thought the fan was bad...
- Future (or current?) replacement for Nagios?
- The lord answers prayers
- Testing Disk Speed
- HOWTO: RedHat Cluster Suite
- Possible Nagios Conference in Baltimore
- How NOT to cool your server room
- What to look for in virtualization?
- Congrats to the winners!
- Last chance for a duck!
- ▶March (14)
- When the train comes, everybody rides!
- It's only a slow day on the blogosphere
- Free Franklin Covey Planner Today
- Tape Labeling in AMANDA
- Phone Support: What did you say?
- Excuses for scarce updates
- Job Hunting? Try this site
- Pre-emptive Troubleshooting
- Short blog outage
- Another storage option
- The trend towards Overlicensing
- Systems Administration: Synonymous with Autodidactism?
- Slashdot discussion on HA and load balancing
- Dissecting laptops...
- ▶February (25)
- February Article Up at Simple Talk: Exchange
- Emergency Server Room Light
- Musings on Computer Security
- How to ask questions on the internet
- Undelete any open files in Unix/Linux
- Step back from the ledge, careercast says it's all ok
- Bizarre issues almost always point to DNS problems
- Ideas on maintaining a customized shell environment
- New resource for IT Administrators is being built
- Things in the lineup
- Fine, fine, I'll do it. I'll microblog too
- Stretching That Almighty Dollar
- CIO Management Methods
- Link: Introduction to Xen Virtualization
- In case you missed it earlier...
- Spanning tree and dhcp: Knowledge doesn't always imply action
- Running to keep up
- Oracle Architecture Basics
- Boy are my arms tired!
- Backups Suck
- From whence I came
- Software patching is the other benefit of virtualization
- Mediterranean Island: Malta
- (Really) Small Office Environments
- Dear Diary: Jackpot
- ▶January (24)
- Redundant Redundancy
- Secular and Religous History in Turkey
- Remote Desktop Shortcuts
- Καλώς ήρθατε και πάλι!
- vnstat Console Network Traffic Monitor
- Don't Panic
- Hello from Rome!
- My Most Oft Used Cisco IOS Commands
- Can you believe, I got over the wall!
- This means I've been here too long...
- Good knowledge resource for Windows AD stuff
- Slashdot: Active Directory Alternatives
- This is the sort of thing that happens when you google yourself
- Enterprise Quality Firewall Products?
- What do you need to be a sysadmin?
- Switches in Server Racks
- Learn to not suck at security
- Adventures in VOIP part 3
- My first article is up at Simple Talk: Exchange
- Use Double Driver to simplify your next reinstall
- See, this is why I like open source software
- Debugging traffic flow in netscreens
- Catagorized screw heads
- Cisco Feature Navigator for IOS images
- ▶December (16)
- ▶2008 (184)
- ▶December (26)
- Update on the Zune issue
- Note to anyone selling equipment
- Zune: Y2K + 8 11.9/12
- The mobile device is dead! Long live the mobile device!
- Scare Tactics and Security Warnings!
- Adventures in VOIP part 2
- If you're looking for documentation, Craig Borysowich might be your man
- Backup (and Recovery)
- IT Admin groups on social networking sites
- Systems Administrations Advent Calendar
- Merry Christmas!
- "I'm sure it's nothing..just a random nagios timeout error. I'll be right back"
- More undersea cables cut...this is not a repeat of a few months ago
- Adventures in VOIP Part 1
- Work status update
- IE Vulnerability - We're stopping use
- Mounting disks by UUID rather than /dev/device
- Survey Complete
- Some Campfire Stories
- Never thought to check there...
- What? SSH stuff AGAIN?!?!?
- Layers of (non)abstraction
- Great comment on Bruce Schneier's blog
- User Support, Intrusion Detection, and Broken Firewalls. Kids, don't try this at home
- IT Administrator Job (dis)Satisfaction Survey
- RSS aggregation of blog entries and the like
- ▶November (29)
- Gift ideas for you and the other sysadmins in your life
- More LVM information
- Quality Assurance vs Quality Control
- Doing sysadminy things with Windows PreInstalled Environments
- Happy Thanksgiving!
- The case of the 500-mile email
- Infrastructure Switchover
- Interesting bug in fresh CentOS install (or why I'm glad I didn't pay for RHEL support on all my servers) from The Life of a Sysadmin
- Imagine a beowu...wait, I mean RAID array of these...
- Configuring the Netgear SSL VPN Concentrators (SSL312/FVS336G) with Active Directory / LDAP
- Default vsftpd on CentOS is dumb
- Unix Rosetta Stone
- Wacky SSH Authorized Keys Tricks
- Great tool for network diagramming
- Building and designing systems: Is the cart pulling the horse?
- Host to host security with SSH Keys
- Datacenter that could belong to S.P.E.C.T.R.E.
- Tips for an initial buildout
- Sysadmin Extorts company for better severance package
- Where to put your system monitoring
- Encrypted Filesystems out of the box on CentOS
- Best. Bug. Ever.
- Justify the extistance of IT (from Slashdot)
- The Creative Admin
- WPA TKIP Cracked
- Stupid Unix Tricks (from Slashdot)
- The balance of security and usability
- Scalability in the face of the incoming onslaught
- Sysadmin Mobile Devices
- ▶October (23)
- Re: System Administration needs more PhDs
- Dell's DRAC card sucks
- A couple of amusing videos...
- Outsourcing your web hosting
- The weather outside is frightful...
- Multiple privilege levels in IOS
- Issue remote commands to Windows machines without installing ssh
- Outage Statistics
- Does 'onboarding' sound like 'waterboarding' to anyone else?
- Is RAID 5 a risk with higher drive capacities?
- Unexpected source of knowledge
- Changes in things around here
- Amanda Backup Suite
- Setting up Monitoring
- When I asked for "normal", this is not what I meant!
- Back to a normal week (hopefully)
- Other people's server room heat issues
- Big Picture: How do you store old email?
- Foiling the dreaded zip-tie
- Answer to Slow Speeds from last week
- Working in NJ
- They always said things come in threes
- Link to 15 tips on how to setup your rack
- ▶September (20)
- Introduction to LVM in Linux
- Temporary Ignorance
- Slow speeds transferring data between my machines
- Funky Command Line
- Sysadmin Multitasking
- Trade Magazines
- Thank you Jim!
- Shopping for email hosting
- Netscreen and RADIUS
- Great News!
- It's the little things that get to you
- Ohio LinuxFest 2008
- Recovery and return to normalcy
- Post-WindStorm Update
- Behind Schedule
- Followup of Followup of Downtime
- Followup on downtime computations
- Downtime Computations
- Telephone conference calls are a lot like ethernet
- Random thought on iSCSI vs FC
- ▶August (33)
- A look at undersea cables
- Password retention and storage
- When is a sysadmin not a sysadmin?
- Dedicated ESXi: Server or something else?
- BGP Security issue
- New Sysadmin Podcast Series
- NetworkWorld features one of us
- 10 professional skills that no IT administrator should be without
- Discussion of SSL Web Certs
- Display System DNS on OSX
- 5 Ways to improve your network without breaking the bank
- Update on the VPN Issue
- VPN Woes
- Burnout and the toll it takes
- Really bad cabling jobs!
- Creative Community Hacking Forum
- Project Management Software
- Wireless Security (of lack thereof)
- Introduction to RAID levels
- OpenOffice trick to auto-increment IP addresses
- Most sought after skills in IT
- Remote Management and its Limits
- Recycling your e-waste
- Email to the position, not the person
- Simple and obvious first
- Disk Quotas
- Sources of wisdom and experience
- Linux authentication against Active Directory
- Just because it's strange
- Desktop Workspaces
- Flash Drives: Archival Media?
- Couple of interesting links for your Sunday Enjoyment
- HOWTO: Punch down blocks for in-building wiring
- ▶July (21)
- Security Policy Best Practices
- Life After Windows?
- Arranging your workspace
- Fascinating behavior from a linux host
- Proper Disclosure of Technology
- Happy Sysadmin Day
- HOWTO: Server Cable Management
- Excellent Linux Command: dmidecode
- More on Admin Responsiblity
- NAT: Unjustly maligned or a soon-to-be anachronism?
- Escape from NJ
- Wednesday Guest Blog
- Monday Guest Blog
- (Short) Story time
- Final Preperations
- Cataloging parts for the move
- Stupid Routing Tricks
- The effects of Slashdot
- Remote Claustrophobia
- Logical Network Diagrams
- DNS Names for internal hosts
- ▶June (19)
- Backing up config files
- DNS Changes through ICANN
- HOWTO: Order a T1
- Storm Weathered
- Outstanding Weather!
- Appropriate Redundancy
- Sources of Information
- Mobile Notifications
- Howto: Racks and rackmounting
- Ethics in Administration
- Admin Heroics
- The importance of documentation (and having a place to put it)
- The beginning of system management
- Infrastructure upgrades through forest fires
- Scripting and trusting GPG
- Managing your network contracts
- Gnotime and Twitter
- Datacenter tips
- Google's intelligent searching
- ▶May (13)
- Sign you use vi too often
- You're not just a systems administrator
- Dell Blade Enclosure issues [updated]
- Once more unto the breach
- The Tao of Systems Administration
- Backup Scheme
- Environmental Issues in the datacenter
- Storage and bandwidth, my two enemies
- Sharing your keyboard and mouse
- Virtualization
- Time Management
- Introduction and Welcome
- ▶December (26)
About the Author
Hi! I'm Matt Simmons, author of the Standalone Sysadmin blog. I've been a small infrastructure administrator since aound 2001, nearly always on my own, hence the "Standalone Sysadmin" title. I started this blog in May of 2008 and have thoroughly enjoyed every interaction I've had because of it. Thank you for visiting!-
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June 5th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Wow, you have been busy.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
You can add a link to your ServerFault profile, that updates automatically to your Blog with the following:
<iframe scrolling="no" width="210" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" src="http://serverfault.com/users/flair/4392.html" height="60" marginwidth="0"></iframe>