So, I don’t normally talk about work on my blog, just because … hey, who wants to work? I’d rather surround myself with Reese’s cups and watch Roger Ramjet. I totally recommend it.
Anyway, at Digital Trike, my current depriver of candy and animated features, I’m doing full time systems administration. It turns out I enjoy doing that quite a bit. One thing they’ve let me start doing, is writing blog posts that are howtos covering topics related to Linux. I’m going to be doing mostly Gentoo posts, and some stuff related to CentOS as well, since we use both of them in development and production (yay, Gentoo!).
I just posted my first entry on their blog, which covers setting up collectd on both distros. I’ll warn you, it’s a bit lengthy, but I tried to cover most of the bases as well as I could, while keeping the setup pretty generic. It’s designed to be a two-parter, this being the first one, and I’ll cover CGP, a PHP frontend to actually see the stats probably next week sometime.
Lemme know what you guys think, I’d totally be up for some feedback. 🙂
so it’s “emerge” under linux and “wget; tar; configure …” under CentOS. It must be very frustrating for you. I wouldn’t enjoy to administer such OS.
No, seriously? make; make install? On a production system? What a mess!
Digital Trike! Switch to gentoo! It allows to compile and test everything in UAT and push the same, tested binaries to the production.
I don’t mind actually. I’m so used to installing stuff from source, that it’s actually my preferred method. 🙂 And I realize I could just use RPMs for CentOS, but as a general rule, I don’t like installing them from third parties.
well, that I’m saying is that you should not install packages manually (with, for example, config –prefix=/usr). First, you need to install all dependences manually (and uninstall if needed!) too. Second, you need to remember all configure flags or keep configure string somewhere. And lastly, you need to trace all updates, patches for all packages in your system. I would always write an ebuild for that. Power of Gentoo. And what do you do if RPM is not available, not compiled with right options or you need to apply a patch? I don’t know, I’m not a rpm fan 😉
More articles on Gentoo systems admin please! While the Gentoo forums and wikis are a great resource, it’s hard to find information about managing a reliable Gentoo system (as opposed to gripes about broken ebuilds, slow graphics, and KDE/Gnome’s desktop failings ;-).
Sure, that’s the idea. Just basic system maintenance. There’s so many things that go into it, that when you’re doing sysadmin for awhile, are just “normal”, and I assume everyone else knows them. I’m gonna try and cover those … kinda the standards that I apply on any box. 🙂
Whoever thought of putting the two huge banners that cover half the screen was an absolute genius. 8-\
Yah, that doesn’t really work on the blog, does it?