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!

Morning!

Following yesterday's announcement on a Debian vulnerability in openssl, everybody is encouraged to follow this instructions in order to ensure that all the keys generated by openssl are replaced by new, non-buggy ones:

http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys

So, today I faced a new challenge at work. Yesterday we updated one of our linux boxes from RedHat 3 to RedHat 5. The server was hosting a web application that takes data both from a mysql database (for content management) and oracle 7.3 (for corporative data).

The access from php to Oracle 7.3 was being done with a php module called oci 8 (http://es.php.net/oci8) that relied on an oracle client being properly installed on the machine.

It’s sad that after 3 months without an article in my techie blog, the first thing to appear it’s to announce that finally Microsoft has proven that the developed world is not ruled by R+D, or by logic. It’s only ruled by Money.

Yesterday, Microsoft anounced that the OOXML format (the propietary, pseudo-ECMA standard format of Office2007) has passed the ISO approval.

Curiously enough, they posted that info BEFORE the ISO. Quite suspicious, don’t you think?

So now, it’s possible for me to certify my company with ISO standards at 100% and then have interoperability problem with another company that has also got certified by ISO standards at 100%, just because Microsoft and his friends have been able to buy the organization which is in charge of creating standards for the Industry to avoid a situation like the one they just created.

I feel sad.

Well, I'm still not done with the hp-ux and solaris (yay, I got a solaris box to try out) parts of the LVM series part II, meanwhile I'ld like to share some thoughts about Xen.

For those who doesn't know what it is, Xen it's a paravirtualization technology, designed to create, manage and mantain virtual machines running on a real server. It has a really good performance (when running paravirtualized) and as everything free (as in freedom) is not as easy to use from scratch as it's propietary competitor ( namely VMWare)

Well, while i'm finishing the second part of the LVM series, I'll share with you this link to the "most useful" opensource/free software for MacOsX.

I've found it really useful, as I did not know, in example: KisMac (port of kismet), Burn (k3b-like tool) and the Cocoa port of gimp (Seashore)

Open Source software for macosX

Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions?

1. Why did I size this filesystem <randomsize> only?

2. Where the hell do I mount the new disk(s)?

3. Is there any way to dinamically increase this filesystem?

Then, LVM (Logical Volume Manager) may help you!

(Yay! I always wanted to begin an article with this crappy intro!)

Now, seriously speaking, LVM is one of the most useful tools for disk and volume management. It lets you increase/decrease partitions on the fly, use different physical disks, perform snapshot based backups and simpligy storage management in your servers.

Finally, it's done.

I built up the sysadmin website, this will keep my non-geek-friends happier, as I pretend to separate the sysadmin things in my life from my personal blog. I would like also to make all the sysadmin things available in english, as it's the most used language on the sysadmin world.

Hope you enjoy the site and the contents I'll be putting!
Cheers.