Topics that concern LISA are fairly stable from year to year. Configuration management, storage options, security, cloud computing (particularly with Xen), IPv6, customer relations, and a bit of NoSQL formed the pillars of the program. […]

CFEngine is a surprisingly flexible and fast tool for distributed configuration management. A new version was released this week. […]

Help define the most useful reports from log data. […]

Making sense out of all of the components of cloud computing confuses even many of the major analysts. It's easy to understand how Google, Amazon, or SalesForce.com fit into the picture. But who is Eucalyptus and what do they do? Does CohesiveFT compete with enStratus or does it complement enStratus? And what is this vCloud thing anyway? […]

About 2 weeks ago, I put in my notice at Internet Broadcasting, setting out for things bigger and better. In the meantime I've been reviewing projects, contacting vendors, and updating documentation. While I've been doing that other administrators are secretly... […]

A recent Wal-Mart intrusion story inspired me to summarize the most egregious, reckless, painful, negligent, sad, idiotic examples of failures with logs and logging - "Top Log FAIL." I am pretty sure that esteemed readers of SysAdmin Blog would never, ever do anything of that sort. […]

Last month I went camping with a couple of tech buddies that also share a love of horses and riding. One of the more interesting campfire discussions that came up was the parallels between deploying a server, and starting... […]

Luke Kanies, author of the Puppet configuration management tool, discusses how to fix what's wrong with system administration and why shell scripts and ssh are the wrong tools to keep your systems up to date. […]