S0E15: "I Spy with My Little Eye"

Posted 2015-09-28 04:01
Modified 2017-01-28 11:52
Comments 0

Monitoring systems, breaking into the IT field and finding work opportunities, config management (again), programming languages as relevant to a sysadmin, and the FCC trying to destroy our ‘Murican freedoms.

• Notes
• Errata
• Music

Notes

• Jthan says the Bubonic Plague is making a comeback
• We talk about the following monitoring systems:
  • Zenoss (see also their Open-Source branch
    • We mention using SNMP alerts
  • Nagios
  • Icinga
  • Ganglia is indeed for cluster networks
  • Cacti and RRDTool are very handy for graphing things like uptime
  • We also mention third-party monitoring services such as Nodeping (and their API, and that they have a built-in hook for Pushover.net) and Pingdom (which also has an API).
  • And there’s also Spiceworks.
• The Linux Foundation’s pamphlet on becoming a GNU/Linux Sysadmin.
• If you need help finding a LUG near you, you can try the resources here (or just do a search for “ Linux user group”)
  • ODesk has indeed become Upwork
  • Elance is also really handy
  • Guru tends to have more coding/programming gigs than admin/engineering gigs, but it’s still worth a look
  • FreeLance.com is also.. okay.
  • But make sure you hit the Freelancing stackexchange FIRST, as it has some of the most useful information you can find.
• I still insist you can just use pdsh and a script/tarball repository, but config management might have some use for your environment.
  • We mention Chef
  • Jthan consistently gripes about Puppet
  • The current “hotness” is Ansible
  • We didn’t mention it, but another popular one is SaltStack
  • I also mention doing a bootstrap via iPXE and Kickstart for fully automatic installs and management.
  • Lastly, it’s a bit specialized for network kit, but check out rConfig
  • Conclusion: you aren’t really going to get a lot of use out of it unless you run a huge mixed-OS infrastructure.
• FCC is trying to ban modified firmware
• Languages that can be useful to a SysAdmin/Engineer:
  • Powershell (for Windows)
  • Bash (which Codecademy has a good intro for); get a GOOD grip on this one
  • Perl is kind of dying out in popularity
  • Python (I highly recommend the Codecademy course) – probably the most useful these days to learn
  • C/C++ has a pretty limited place in a System Administrator/Engineer’s toolkit, but can still come in fairly handy.

Errata

• Sorry for the echoes- we found an editor, and we’re still tweaking things so we can get something we all like.
• Icinga’s FAQ mentions how to pronounce it.
  • There are a lot of languages that use click-consonants
• And we totally forgot to mention Zabbix
• Oops. The editor didn’t cut 47m27s – 47m48s out. Say hi to Alli!

Music

Author r00t^2
Categories (Pilot Season)