mtr is an essential, real-time network diagnostic tool for your sysadmin toolbox.
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Sysadmin tales: Take a look back at an old school IT prank

In the Age of IT Innocence, things and practical jokes were much simpler. Take five minutes to kick it “old school” with this stone age prank.
Rick Greene
Wed, 10/28/2020 at 3:13am

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“Apple IIe, Living Computer Museum & Labs, Seattle” by mattk1979 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Set your Wayback Machine to the early ’80s. Disco was dead and gone, pop rock was making waves, and consumer computers were available enough that some schools started figuring out that teaching computers was something they should do.

My school was one of those—the lovely Manheim Township High School in Neffsville, PA. A classroom was repurposed as a computer lab, as the prior computer area was barely larger than a closet and only had four terminals connected to some type of “miniframe” computer, with one Apple II computer on a rolling cart.

Topics:  
Linux  
Hardware  
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When brilliant strategies go wrong, they can really go wrong and your opponent has to come to your rescue.
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The history of an API: GitLab Runner and Podman

Here is one sysadmin’s journey through Podman and GitLab Runner integration
Pablo Greco
Tue, 10/27/2020 at 5:36am

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Photo by Michael Foster from Pexels

For a while, I’ve been working on a project that uses GitLab Runner with Docker as its executor. Since runners are hosted on CentOS 7, everything made sense—until we started looking at moving it to CentOS 8, and our world exploded.

The first thing we were thinking was, since Podman is a drop-in replacement, this should be easy (you can imagine the veracity of that statement yourselves). The truth was, Podman didn’t have the API that GitLab Runner used to manage the containers, so even if we could do everything manually, we weren’t there yet.

Topics:  
Linux  
Containers  
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Using an Ansible playbook to manage workstation and server updates

In part two of this series on writing playbooks, we examine updates for servers and workstations. This playbook manages updates differently depending on the role the systems play on the network.
David Both
Mon, 10/26/2020 at 9:07pm

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Image by wiredsmartio from Pixabay

I have decided to streamline my update process for customer systems I support as well as for my own Linux devices. While a series of complex scripts have served me well for a long time, the advantages of using Ansible for this task are just too many to pass up.

Topics:  
Linux  
Linux Administration  
Ansible  
Automation  
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Here in this introduction to Playbook creation, we examine the play that manages updates for a local Ansible controller machine.
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