Tag Archives: sysadmin

SysAdmins: Thou Shalt Write Standard Documents!

I got bit today.  A switch at one of our data centers ran into some problems due to an ethernet speed / duplex mismatch.  I’ve run into this a million times in the past, and always make sure that I don’t have auto negotiate enabled on ports other than gigabit.  Well, almost always.  I forgot […]

More Reasons Why SimpleDB is Not the Death of Big Iron

A few more notes on why SimpleDB should not be considered the end of traditional database methodology:

it’s non-relational and you can’t run queries against multiple ‘domains’
attributes are limited to 1024 characters
you must zero-pad your numbers
no built in full-text search
your are not guaranteed immediate access to updated data

The more and more that I look at this, […]

Settle Down, Arrington

Amazon recently announced its SimpleDB service, a sort of BerkleyDB On Demand. It sounds really cool, especially for getting a web app up with less infrastructure. I’d like to use it next year to test out some simple ideas.
As usual, some tech savvy individuals are seizing the opportunity to jump up and down […]

Systems Administration, Gardening, and a Little Bit of Mysticism

Introduction
My dog woke me up around 4 AM, wanting to go for a walk. While this used to greatly annoy me, I now appreciate the time to roam around and get lost in my thoughts. The mind is in a strange state at this point, being beyond the realm of dreams, but not […]