Hi all,
Just discovered how brilliant Twitter really is. Never been so quick to find answers to technical questions before ! 🙂
I use TweetDeck as a desktop/mobile client….you should really try those out.
Bgrds,
Finnzi
All posts by finnzi
Still alive !
Howdy all,
I’m still alive…just been busy with life, work and everything 🙂
Going to do some changes on the site and hopefully become a little more active.
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Rebel yell…..changes?
Howdy all!
Been a long time since I last posted something. I’ve been quite busy with life/work/play.
This summer was pretty cool, a lot of motorcycle riding and just good old fun with my friends & my son. Found out I like heavy metal more then I could imagine, went to Eistnaflug (a 4 day long heavy metal fest at Neskaupstadur, My hometown). Saw quite a few bands there (Skalmold, Solstafir, Alice in Chains cover band and many…maaaaaaannnyyy more :).
So, in short, motorcycles, leather, mud, rain, rock/metal, hiking, beer and sun ruled my summer!
Since I was already playing a rebel I decided to part from Skyggnir/Nyherji where I have been for the last 10.5 years as a helpdesk operator, technician, network admin and at last, a sysadmin and consultant and move over to Skyrr/EJS to become a full time Network Administrator. I will start there at 1. December. The thought of leaving this company and the bunch of people whom I have worked with for the last decade is pretty tough but I really think this is a good time to switch to another workplace and learn something new.
So…since I have not been in touch with network equipment for the last 4 years or so I knew i had to brush up on my skills and decided to go for CCNA certification ASAP. A friend at Skyrr threw some books at me so I spend most of my free time reading for the exam….
The next 6-12 months will be pretty darn exciting and I am looking forward to have some new challenges thrown at me. However …again, it’s hard to part from a company where you have been a large contributor to and to part from the people who have been (almost) my second family for a long time.
But ….the winter is coming and I have to move my motorcycles to garages around town to keep them safe from the winter here in Iceland. However I am sure I can ride my Suzuki from time to time when the roads are not too “ice-y” 🙂
Well….off to fight my way through life!
Bgrds,
Finnzi
TECHNICAL: Patching Linux machines…..to reboot or not to reboot?
Howdy all,
I keep seeing comments from a lot of people on various boards/sites that Linux is so much better then Windows because you “never” have to reboot Linux machines and therefore Linux must be superior to Windows!
This kinda creeps me out. When I login to a Linux box that has not been rebooted for 800 days I often slap my face. Why? ….oh boy, here is a list of things:
1. Services. Will they start up automatically after the next reboot?
2. Broken updates. Will the machine boot at all? (Before you yell at me and tell me that updates never break anything…..I have seen my share of errors after updates;)
3. Hardware. Will the machine post after the next reboot? Is everything else ok?
4. Glibc updates. Sometimes you have some pretty critical fixes that should really be activated (Glibc is loaded on each application start, therefore you really should restart all applications on the server anyway so they are updated). Please read the changelog for Glibc updates the next time you are updating.
5. fstab and other configuration files. Are you 100% sure those are all up to date and all your filesystems are correctly defined there?
6. Kernel updates. Sure…you could use KSplice (or no…Oracle just bought them and they are not taking any new customers!) Kernel updates often include security updates as well as critical bugfixes. Please go through the changelogs and make sure you are not affected by the changes before saying that you do not need to reboot into the new kernel.
And there are probably more reasons. Those are just some of the things that popped in my head.
I am pretty sure most of you roll your eyes and call me stupid. But I am telling you….those things happen. And you don’t really want to have to deal with them after a catastrophic power failure in your datacenter (or in any other catastrophic situation).
If your system is so critical that you can never do any maintenance on it then you might have a huge design flaw in your infrastructure. You could minimize the downtime with a HA cluster. However you will always have *some* downtime unless your application has some kind of active/active ability (some kind of loadbalancing setup with a smart backend etc).
Make sure you can schedule downtime for patches (and even look into firmware updates as well). Getting bitten by stupid “Linux is better then Windows!” fights and decide not to reboot because of your pride is …well….stupid 😉
Just my 2 cents….
Bgrds,
Finnzi
Awesome day!
Howdy!
Spent the day riding on my Suzuki DRZ…..I still have a large grin on my face and I am sure it will stay there until sometime next month!
Need to get new tires thought…I “stopped” while going up a hill at least two times and somehow managed to drop the bike both times…..hill score 1, Finnzi score 0.
Planning to buy Michelin T63 tires on Monday so I can beat that hill 🙂
If the weather stays like this until Monday I am sure I will spend tomorrow riding my Fazer…..This is a awesome weekend!
Bgrds,
Finnzi (the guy with the large grin!)
First post!
Howdy all,
After a “small” mistake I found out that I did not have backups of my WordPress installation so all my posts are gone…..which is “awesome”…..*shruugggg*
However this gives me a opportunity to redesign the site and maybe even put something useful here which was always the plan anyway 🙂
Lets see how it goes….
Bgrds,
Finnzi