SysAdmin Day

The Last Friday Of July is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Yay for me.

tired random thoughts

Who needs sleep when you're upgrading your Generator, Network, SAN and mail server in the same two-week period? I ended up slightly restless and looking for things to play with.

I tried out this rails thing. RHN was down so I couldn't throw together a test system in an "enterprise" environment. Luckily I can count on Debian. It was all too easy. I found a cute little tutorial and I think it's actually pretty neat. Takes a lot of the manual labor out of web development. I'd like to really try it to see if the framework went too far and locks me in. At the moment I feel like I could be locked into something but I also kind of like it. It's like apt for web development. Programming is all about creating abstractions. Will using the rails abstraction help or hurt me? I can see it going either way. Only one way to find out; write something real in it. Either way it's better for me than using PHP again.

SVN can use WebDAV and authentication for it should be controllable by Apache's devices including mod_shib. So Shibboleth federated members should be able to collaborate on our SVN server provided that their federation groups them (since we don't everyone from their institution writing to our repository).

June

I was traveling in June. I've had things to add but haven't had a chance. For now I will just link to:

• Python in 10 minutes
• The beauty of LaTeX