Notes to Self

This is where I'm collecting notes to myself. These are my notes on how to do things when administrating my systems - esentially, the things I wish I'd found somewhere else on the net, but didn't. It also gives me a soapbox to explain how I think the world should be run.

Some of these are things I've learned when dealing with our remote cluster (see CSG Cluster) which is miles away from my desk. Note being able to easily walk up to my server makes certain things much harder.

• Dealing with Spam describes how I deal with getting ~200 pieces of spam a day and still retain some civility.
  
  
• Web Interface for CollectD describes what I've done to make an acceptable web interface for collectd.
  
  
• Disk Performance records the details of my efforts to get a handle on how fast the various RAID devices I manage are.
  
  
• Drupal Experiences This documents my love-hate relationship with a CMS and in particular with Drupal, including Bulk Loading Data into Drupal.
  
  
• Ganglia This is a historical reference to a post I made to mailing list about my difficulties in figuring out how to get Ganglia to behave.
  
  
• Power records the details of my efforts to measure the amount of electricity required for the machines I manage.
  
  
• PXE Booting describes how I try to avoid booting from CDs. It's fine when your server is in front of you, harder when it's miles away or you have 20 installs to do.
  
  
• Using IPMI describes how I attempt to "watch" for hardware problems in machines that are not near.
  
  
• No more KVM using Serial Over LAN at remote sites.
  
  
• Automagic install of Debian requiring no fingers (preseeding).
  
  
• Unix Notes, things to remember administering Unix machines.