Preston4tw

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TROPHY CASE

Finally finished v3 of the website - looking for feedback. by MoonMonstarin web_design

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

Have you considered adding keyboard arrow navigation?

Would like critic and advice for my resume by disantoin sysadminjobs

[–]Preston4tw 1 point2 points ago

A few things...

Based on that resume I wouldn't consider you for a sysadmin job. That resume reads more like you're applying for a network admin spot. If you're interested in doing system administration stuff, grab an RHCSA which should help you get in the door of a few places.

Also, your resume is also too long. Unless you've got a ridiculous amount of experience, your resume should probably be one page. It helps you to reduce your resume down to the important / awesome things, and shows you know how to effectively communicate by not wasting the reader's time.

You can reduce space by tailoring your resume to the job posting, only including experience that is relevant to the job you're applying for. You can condense some of the other information by including a short paragraph at the top of your resuming briefly touching on who you are and how you got there, for example..

Social, motivated individual, graduated from XX college with honors, acting as president of the XX club. Experienced with hardware and network. Blah blah blah.

Guys can understand by troll777in fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu

[–]Preston4tw -9 points-8 points ago

It's not whether or not you hold the door, it's that you're breaking another very important set of rules:

1) Be handsome.

2) Be attractive.

3) Don't be unattractive.

Seeking linux sysadmins for a bootstrapped web hosting company. ~7 years in operation. Telecommute, as much open source as feasible & competitive salaries. by flockofderpin linuxadmin

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

Thanks for the reply. I look forward to seeing the results of the Limoncelli test. It's based loosely on the Joel test for software developers. The Joel test was created by the CEO of StackOverflow (Joel Spolsky) and they've adopted the test on their job board. A company posting a job opening can score themselves using that test (example), so it provides a little bit of extra standardized information to job seekers, which is good.

I'll send over a resume in the next few days and we can talk more to see if we would mutually be a good fit.

Seeking linux sysadmins for a bootstrapped web hosting company. ~7 years in operation. Telecommute, as much open source as feasible & competitive salaries. by flockofderpin linuxadmin

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

I have some questions.

1) Are you familiar with the Limoncelli Test? To the extent that it wouldn't present a risk to the company, would you consider taking the test (or having the Fused admins take it) and posting the results?

2) To what extent will the hired admin be interacting directly with customers?

3) How large is the company, and how many of the other employees also telecommute? Are there any communication issues as a result? Is there anything special that is done to attempt to address issues that can be caused by a lack of face to face communication in meat space?

4) In the notes section of the careers page there is this:

We often donate 100% of our December revenue to a random cause we come across. Our way of paying it forward.

Can you talk about some of the causes the company has supported?

5) Possibly related to #4, how does the company contribute back to the open source community?

Having a Season 1 Marathon this weekend? Might I suggest... by Alamein gameofthrones

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

Ok, most men are made of water. The ones playing this drinking game are made of alcohol.

We are sysadmins @ reddit. Ask us anything! by alienthin sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 2 points3 points ago

Second Life was evaluating message queuing systems. They examined RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ and 0MQ, and many others. While their criteria for a messaging system is probably going to be different from Reddit, it still might be an interesting read if you're interested in that kind of stuff. See here.

Your username is how you die, how do you die? by pluspluskidin AskReddit

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

Winning.

Sysadmins! What solutions are there for syncing files to multiple servers? by glisignoliin sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 3 points4 points ago

It's called murder (as in flock of crows). Here's another related link: http://engineering.twitter.com/2010/07/murder-fast-datacenter-code-deploys.html

Bittorrent seems like a good fit. Murder might be overkill (ha!) for your needs but hey it's good to have options.

State of the Union Thread 1/24/2012 by curtainsin politics

[–]Preston4tw 25 points26 points ago

and that human dignity cannot be denied

Unless you are Bradley Manning

A few changes around /r/piano by OnaZin piano

[–]Preston4tw 17 points18 points ago

Speaking of practicing, I would like to see some side bar links related to practicing. music theory info and links would also be good.

Python in Bash Scripts by ifyouwillin Python

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

Not sure why you're getting down voted, this looks like a solution looking for a problem. It also pollutes the global namespace, which is...not recommended (import this). I'd be interested to see use cases where this is superior.

If I'm fired, am I required to give up passwords? (x-post:legaladvice) by krielin sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

Talk to a lawyer. A network administrator for the city of San Francisco got reamed pretty badly when he refused to turn over passwords for the networking equipment, though the situation was probably a bit different. Unless you were doing something like using the same passwords for work that you use personally, it's probably in your interests to simply give up the passwords. If you were using personal passwords at work, perhaps offer to change them to something random and provide the updated passwords. Alternatively, bargain. "I'd be happy to, though as I don't work for you any more I'd have to insist that you compensate me for my time and services", etc.

PuTTY Bug Fix, Password kept for rest of run...since 0.59 by Hachyain sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw -1 points0 points ago

Indeed. I wasn't even really aware PuTTY was still being maintained.

HTTP Status cats! by neoicein sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 2 points3 points ago

Purrfect...

Good books/learning resources for an IT Operations Manager wannabe by voldepagein sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 1 point2 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I have a man crush on Adam Jacob. These youtube clips may be relevant / helpful:

He has an amazing way of articulating problems that commonly / historically plague operations and proposing solutions.

Interviewing for a new IT Management job. What questions should I ask and what red flags should warn me off the job? by Bad-Sciencein sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 1 point2 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

In the same line of thinking as Hooly23, a few things come to mind. I would want to know about the current status this prospective employer is in, and what they're looking for from you.

You're sitting pretty right now, but considering moving, so if they are in fantastic shape and simply looking for you to hold things down, would you be satisfied with that (everything is working perfectly? how boring)? If they're not, and they need someone to overhaul their IT, will you have what you need (budget, support of upper management) to be able to make those changes without getting shut down? If they want you to come in and shake things up, I would want a lot of that support written into my contract.

Need some advice / opinions on spec'ing out a workstation for running 6 or so virtual machines (X-Post from /Buildapc) by maasedgein sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 2 points3 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

The biggest resource constraint you will have will probably be disk IO. One large hard drive will slow to a crawl so slow it will make the speed at which grass grows appear to be faster than the speed of light if multiple VMs trying to do I/O to a single physical hard drive.

Either find a way to get each VM it's own physical disk by getting a tower chassis with nothing but 5 1/4" bays and load them up with hot swappable drive bays and old and cheap sata drives in that space range, or at the very least get some kind of RAID controller and setup for the server.

Beyond that, I would suggest giving yourself some headroom on the RAM (8 VMs @ 2GB RAM, 4GB for host = 20GB RAM, +20% overhead = ~24GB RAM), and with whatever budget is left over get the best processor you can afford. Ideally something with a lot of cores so you can allocate one core per VM. While most processors and motherboards support virtualization instruction sets these days, check anyways and make sure the hardware you're ordering supports virtualization. Most virtualization product vendors have a hardware compatibility list.

If you don't have an infinite budget, skimp first on RAM and simply run fewer VMs, than CPU, lastly disk. I'm not super familiar with Dell's product lineup but hopefully this information helps you make your decision.

Scientific Linux in Production? by degobain sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 1 point2 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I'm curious about this as well. CentOS has been lagging behind in their release cycles and so some people are looking at jumping ship from CentOS to SL.

I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has attempted this and what kind of success or horror stories they might have.

Why should I use a SAN? Different use cases? ELI5? by AtlasOnein sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 1 point2 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I think the questions you should ask your boss are ones that are relevant to the business. Try to put the decisions of your boss in the context of helping the business be more successful.

Instead of asking why he chose a local RAID over the SAN you might try thinking in terms more like:

How does this database server contribute to the financial success of this company?

What are the performance requirements of this server, and what data did you use to decide to use a local raid instead of the SAN? Were there any? Was it simply more cost effective to go this route?

If a catastrophic failure were to happen, how much money would the business lose by this database server being unavailable? To what extent can the loss be quantified? $1,000 per hour. $10,000 per hour? You're going through the trouble to RAID both the OS and the database, and back it up. Does the cost of the unavailability of the database server justify spending even more money to make the database highly available by purchasing a second server for even more redundancy?

In the event of various catastrophic failure event scenarios, how would the time to restore the database server be affected by the decision to use a local RAID instead of the SAN?

You could spend a lot of time examining and comparing the various performance characteristics of hard drives, RAID configurations and controllers, SAN performance, pros and cons of each, etc. The details are fun to delve into, (how many more database queries per second can a SAS drive with a 3ms seek vs a SATA drive with an 8ms seek do? random or sequential?), but if you have no business requirement saying "This database server will need to initially handle X number of random primarily read queries per second to support financial application Y. We expect the number of queries per second to grow to Z after T months" it's not hugely relevant to helping the company achieve their goals, you're just deciding how to squeeze the most performance out of your budget.

Anyone got a preferred IPKVM? by bread555in sysadmin

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I have run into a particular issue when using various IP KVM devices when dealing with large (number of servers) outages. Depending on the number of servers you need to IP KVM up, you may want to keep this in mind.

Several IP KVM devices will allow you to connect a relatively large number of servers to the head unit, but only allow a small number of people parallel access. So, say you make a change across a large number of servers that causes them to all lose network access. If you have eight people and only one or two of them can use the KVM at a time, you hit a bottle neck trying to bring your servers back online. It's also a potential single point of failure.

I'm personally a fan of server integrated lights out management (Dell RACs, HP's integrated lights out management, etc), but if you're a white/black box shop, I would suggest you consider worst case scenarios when comparing products and decide if a head unit or some kind of per server device is the way you want to go.

Ladies of Reddit: What are your best "never wrap your vagina around crazy" stories? by classactdynamoin AskReddit

[–]Preston4tw 2 points3 points ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

I AMA Zach Braff. by zachinozin IAmA

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

How much time to you spend reading tvtropes?

I love your work.

Reddit @ Defcon ? by yamamushiin Defcon

[–]Preston4tw 0 points1 point ago

sorry, this has been archived and can no longer be voted on

Coming to in-n-out? Bout to leave.

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