Mike Loseke's Journal Entries

During the course of a work day I often find myself reviewing several documents. As a part of our internal processes we note in these documents when they're reviewed by appending our name and the date to a list of reviewers. As you can imagine, this gets boring when adding it manually. Vim has the ability to make this much simpler.

Often when using screen I'll run across the need to share a session with a co-worker or client. If we're both logged in as the same user a simple "screen -x" usually does the trick. This doesn't work as cleanly when the person trying to join is logged in on a different account. Fear not, this is actually fairly simple to accomplish!

Using the Linux-HA heartbeat software can lead to some interesting situations, even after you have a stable and reliable configuration. I recently ran into a situation where human and crm (Cluster Resource Manager) were bumping heads over resource control.

The last real trade show I attended was CeBIT in the early 90's when the excitement was still about Netware 4.0 about to be released. It's been a while... No longer working in a pure IT environment, and it being even longer since working in academia, SAGE/LISA seemed a little too focused for the sysadmin line of work as I'm currently practicing it. OSCON seemed to really fit the bill this year, and I think it was a good first conference of this sort for me to attend. Read on for some highlights.

Having been running BackupPC for the last several months, we wanted to hand off some of the periodic auditing that we do to a non-admin user. BackupPC allows for host-specific users that have full access to a specific host or hosts but there's currently no facility to allow for a user who can see data on each host in a read-only fashion. Read on for how we implemented this interface.