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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 21 declined, 2 accepted (23 total, 8.70% accepted)

Conferences - Are Smaller Better?-> 2

Submitted by
Bandman
Bandman writes "Tom Limoncelli, author of 'The Practice of System and Network Administration', discusses how difficult it is for geeks to build real-life communities if you live outside of a couple high-density tech-oriented areas.

The solution he has in mind are regional conferences devoted to specific topics. He's going to be speaking at the NJ-based PICC'11, but even long-running events like PAX started as a small conference meant to build community.

Having a small group of organizers dedicated to building a local community seems to be more economical for everyone involved, and leads to events where everyone can take a bigger part in the process."
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SysAdmin Conferences Go Local->

Submitted by
Bandman
Bandman writes "Last year, the NJ chapter of LOPSA organized the first "local" SysAdmin conference, meant to be a smaller, more inexpensive option compared to a national conference like LISA or SAGE-AU.

This year, the Seattle chapter is joining the fray with the Cascadia IT Conference, and the NJ-based Professional IT Community Conference is returning in a big way.

Last year's technical sessions are now online, so you can get a taste of what's going on with these local conferences."
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Defining DevOps->

Submitted by Bandman
Bandman writes "DevOps is a trend that has been taking the sysadmin world by storm. The idea of co-mingling sysadmins and develops sounds foreign to too many people (and sounds old-hat to others), but like it or not, the movement has a big foothold.

The author attempts to sow seeds of understanding with a standard definition, stripped of all the "touchy-feely stuff": "DevOps is an increased interaction and interdependency between developers and operations staff""
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Books

Why don't we buy sysadmin books anymore? -> 4

Submitted by Bandman
Bandman writes "Our needs for good information and documentation have not changed, but the way that we get it has. The ebook revolution has made physical shelves of sysadmin books endangered species. A bigger issue may be that even ebook sales of books related to system administration have not been selling. Somewhere along the line, people stopped buying things like "DNS and Bind" or "Sed & Awk".

Has our need for documentation changed, or just our sources of it?"
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XenClient: User Review->

Submitted by Bandman
Bandman writes "Last week was Synergy, and annual product annoucement / cheerleading session from Citrix. At Synergy, Citrix announced XenClient, the next logical step in the progression of desktop virtualization, namely a bare metal hypervisor designed to run on end-user laptops.

Blogger Matt Simmons grabbed a spare laptop and spent some time playing. He shared his thoughts (and pictures) of the process."
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Dell Removes (then reinstates) 3rd Party Drive Sup->

Submitted by Bandman
Bandman writes "Back in February, a posting by Dell rep Howard Shoobe alerted us to the fact that Dell was removing the ability to use non-Dell branded drives in the Poweredge server line, when configured with the PERC H700/H800. There was immediate backlash.

Recently, however, Dell backpedaled on their stance, saying that third party drives would be able to be used, but not officially supported. This much more agreeable stance was brought about by the thousands of Dell customers who railed against the change. The news is that, apparently, Dell listens."
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Programming

The Future of System Administration->

Submitted by
Matt Simmons
Matt Simmons writes "System Administration is changing. Where once, we logged into machines to make them work, we've progressed to managing-through-programming, and we're becoming developers in addition to administrators.

This is an interesting layer of abstraction between us and the machines. I've always thought that, regardless of how far the rest of the society was from the cogs of technology, sysadmins would always need to know the underlying mechanisms of how things worked. With the current tools and trends, that's looking less and less like reality. We can automate virtual machines to be created, installed, and configured all by pressing a single button. What happened to the fun of blinkenlights?"
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Networking

A strong business case for IPv6->

Submitted by
Matt Simmons
Matt Simmons writes "There are many arguments for and against the adoption of IPv6, but it's undeniable that IPv4 address blocks are dwindling. As of April, just over 10% were still unassigned.

Contrary to a lot of the FUD out there, the internet will NOT break when we run out of new addresses. Instead, new internet access will be provided via IPv6 addresses. With the eventual rise of internet access in emerging markets, it seems unavoidable that these new markets will come online with IPv6.

That means that if you don't want to be seen as a second class internet presence, you should be developing an IPv6 migration plan, at least if your company is at all interested in doing business with nearly limitless potential clients. Ignoring this future market could be disastrous to your company's financial future."
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Medicine

Manage stress before it kills you->

Submitted by
Bandman
Bandman writes "Many IT geeks suffer from extreme stress. In many cases, this comes from our professional lives, but our personal lives play a part in this as well. The effects can be dramatic, from lingering illness due to a compromised immune system all the way up to death from cardiac arrest. As an IT admin, I have a lot of stress in my life, but fortunately I got a warning sign before it was too late. I learned ways to deal with it, and wrote an article to help others release some stress from their lives."
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Data Storage

Is ATA over Ethernet a viable option to save money->

Submitted by
Matt Simmons
Matt Simmons writes "During the past few days, I have been researching storage. I've been concentrating on iSCSI, since I was trying to keep costs down, and fiber switches are pretty expensive for my small infrastructure.

While researching, I found out about ATA Over Ethernet (AoE). There seems to be a lot of disagreement about whether it's "ready for the enterprise", while other people use it in their large organizations without complaint.

I'd like some opinions from people who have used it and switched or people who still use it. What are the facts and caveats that only come from experience?"
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