Well, today is my last day at work, I'm currently cleaning my desktop so the next sysadmin will have a nice and clean hard drive to start with.

It has been 18 months of working in a place where you have to deal with both latest technologies and arcane techniques, and where I can say I leave a team of friends. Also I leave one of my most appretiated creatures: the all-capable mail relay, able of filtering 5-millions mails per day, without showing any problem. I'll miss also patching OCI for PHP to be able to access Oracle7 and this stuff that made you think.

The colleagues set me a farewell party, and gave me a "clocky" as farewell present... well, yes, I've some problems with waking up in the morning ;) They also gave me a Biker shirt, as they know my second hobby. They're brilliant.

I'm happy to say that this is the first time I move job without being "burned out", I just move becasuse a new opportunity has come around, and at my age, I think it's good to try new things, before I get stuck in a relationship, compromises, and those things that need you to "settle down".

The new job is focused on SAP and tuning/setting up the OS and database that runs under it, so, again, I'm a SAP Basis Admin, I guess =)

Will keep working on this blog, next monday I've planned to release the second part of the "Advanced works with Ubuntu" series.

Welcome to this new series of articles focused on getting some “power user” knowledge of Ubuntu GNU/Linux. It's kinda focused on system administration and it's going to be a series of articles where you'll have to get familiar with the console, it won't be as Advanced as some other sysadmin topics I've been talking about in this website, but it will be more advanced than the regular activities of an average user.

Overall, we are going to learn:

- Ubuntu Alternate Distribution: A customizable Ubuntu distribution
- Installing Ubuntu: LVM + Software Raid (asked by LifN) – includes advanced partitioning
- Securing the system (Basic security topics you should have in mind when installing an Internet-Faced Ubuntu server.)
- Adding capabilities to our Ubuntu Alternate installation: Aptitude and the “tasks”
- Ubuntu as a file server for a mixed environment (Mac/Win/Linux/Unixes)
- Performance monitoring: detecting bottlenecks and fixing them
- Health monitoring: detecting hardware failures and malfunctions
- Backing up our server: strategies (full,incremental,tape,staging,snapshots...) and tools

At the end of the series I'll publish the PDF with all the content, so you can download it, print it, pass it to friends, and so.
In case that you read something you think may be wrong or inaccurate, don't hesitate to put it in the comments, I'm also human! and I like to be corrected!

Ubuntu Alternate Distribution: A customizable Ubuntu

Canonical has several releases of Ubuntu: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and so on. The main difference between Desktop and Server versions is the kernel, which is tuned differently for each version, and the fact that the server version has no graphical environment, by default.
Also, the server version uses the debian text-based installer, rather than the graphical assistant that you can find in the Desktop versions.
Tha bad side of this approach is that each time you need several copies of the same distribution if you want to have media to install desktops or servers. Truth is that you don't need that many media, you can do everything with just one media: the Ubuntu Alternate Distribution. Oh, by the way, it doesn't have the LiveCD environment but it allows you to create customized installations (in case you have a company and want to perform several installations following a pattern, i.e.)
The funny thing is that RedHat family (RHEL, CentOS, Fedora), have the “Alternate Behavior” by default (yes, I know, I <3 Redhat)

Where do you get the Ubuntu Alternate Media?

To get the Ubuntu Alternate Media, you just have to go to the same place where you download the ubuntu desktop/server iso (http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download) and check the “ Check here if you need the alternate desktop CD. This CD does not include the Live CD, instead it uses a text-based installer.” tick.
Just burn it as you do with the rest of ISOs, and you'll have a bootable disk ready to be installed.

See you on next article!

Well, sometimes it happens, you are not cautious enough, you are looking at the other side of the window to see what's going on, or, like in my case, you are on the phone while setting up your brand new dedicated server (actually the one where I'm going to move this site!)

I was disabling root access through ssh, and, before restarting the daemon and testing, I created myself a user, assign it to the proper groups, and then, restarted the ssh daemon and tried if I could log in properly.

I forgot one thing: ASSIGNING THE DAMN PASSWORD! and I closed the root session, too late, I can't access my new server. Luckily the hosting service will do something about it.

So, next time, I'll remember: I'm a man, and I can handle only one thing at a time.

Some times a sysadmin faces situations where his/her knowledge is far away from what's needed. Or maybe he/she may need to get into a topic suddenly because of a new application, new requirement, and so on.

One may go the classical way of seeking for a book, googleing around and getting disperse info. I prefer to go another way: getting subscriptions to services that may provide information fast and on the go.

In my case, I'm a member of SAGE, a group of system administrators sponsored by SAGE, the subscription is $45 / year and you get access to a mailing list where you can ask and give help on different sysadmin topics, and also you get access to "mini books" covering topocs like: oracle administration, centralized system administration, and so on. If you want more info, have a look at: http://www.usenix.org/membership/classes.html#sage

I'm also paying a monthly subscription to Safari, an online bookshelf from O'Reilly, where you can get online versions of O'Reilly books, and also online versions of books from other vendors. By $22/month you get a bookshelf with ten slots (most books use 1 slot only) and 5 pdf generation token, so you can rende up to 5 chapters monthly. I've been using the service for 4 months now and still haven't used all the tokens (they are cumulative, if you don't spend them in one month, you keep them for the next one.)

Taking in account the cost of the printed books ($30-$60), the transportation to Barcelona (add another $15) and depending on availability, I'm really happy of having the chance of getting instant access to all this media, and being able to get PDF renders at a reasonable price.

Some weeks ago I decided, together with some friends, to start the Spanish PostgreSQL User Group, seems that there is people interested on it as well, so I'll do it, using as much time as I can invest on it.

If anybody is in Spain/Catalunya/Portugal area and wants to contribute, don't hesitate and send me an email!!

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World of LVM: Part I
World of LVM: Part II

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I just finished customizing the new theme for the website.

I want to use the 3 free days I have now to prepare some content for the website, I think I will finish the world of LVM series and start another one on apache tuning. My 5 fellow readers, get ready!

One of the most critical systems I manage is the mail gateway that handles the e-mail for 20 domains of the Catalan Healthcare system.
This system consists of two Proliant DL380G5 running Redhat Enterprise Linux 5, postfix, amavisd-new, clamav and some other antispam tools.

Today RedHat released version 5.2 of RedHat Enterprise Linux 5. They are keeping they schedule of versions, in my humble opinion, it's much better than the ubuntu approach. Also, last week, we saw the birth of Fedora Core 9, aka Sulphur.

Time to get some ISOs

I just updated the website to Drupal 6.2

I lost some functionality (no sitemaps yet for Drupal 6), but I needed to use this website as testground for my blog!