Writing? Yes!

Looks like a magazine might be interested in an article from me ! :). It'd be a technical article related to MailScanner aimed at an intermediate-advanced audience. In fact it will be an article describing how to install MailScanner and its friends on a linux server. If I have enough space, I'll try to cover Redhat, Debian and FreeBSD. I must have the article ready for the 15th of Sep. So I guess it should be published in October. Well, gotta start working on it now :).

If you'd be interested in proofreading, please let me know... ugob at linux dot ca

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

General linux performance troubleshooting

Here's a list of commands that you should execute and then share the output to someone who can help you figure out what resource is the bottleneck in your system. Note, it requires the  sysstat  and  procps  packages (ubuntu and RHEL and its derivatives): uptime vmstat 1 10 iostat -xN 2 10 mpstat -P ALL 3 10 pidstat 1 10 free -mw (or free -m, if your OS doesn't support -w)  uptime is to see the load averages on the system. vmstat is mostly used to tell if the system is swapping or not. If you see significant numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns, your system is most likely swapping (using the hard drive as RAM), which usually slows performance a lot. iostat is mostly used to determine if your disk subsystem is not able to cope with the load. If you see one or more lines that shows 100 or close almost constantly, it is probably the case.  If it is your swap volume, you probably saw numbers in the 'si' and 'so' columns in the  vmsta...
Read more

Starteam migration to Subversion

At work we have been using Borland's Starteam for a while for our SCMS (Source Code Management System).  I don't know it is good or bad, as we have simple team, but when I asked for additionnal licences, I found out that their prices are very high: 1 Named user: 750$, 1 Concurrent user: 3900 (discounted by 50% at the moment I asked for a quote).  And add to that 22% yearly maintenance cost. As we already started using Subversion for other projects, we decided to move from Starteam to Subversion for all of our projects, but our concern was of course how to import all the project versions from Starteam to Subversion.  Thanks to a nice company named Polarion, it is possible with their svnimporter tool http://www.polarion.com/downloads/svn.php .  This tool is available to migrate from other SCMS to Subversion with support for CVS, PVCS, VSS, ClearCase, MKS and Starteam. It took me some time to figure out how to run the tool (which is java-based).  At first I jus...
Read more

Networker automated recovery testing using the REST API - introduction

One feature that is lacking from Networker, compared to some of its competitors, is the built-in automatic recovery testing. However, when there's an API, there is a way.  Networker's REST API is not perfect, but it allows the backup administrator to perform queries about Networker resources (objects). As my workload is going up, I realize that one of the tasks that I tend to skip the most is the periodical recovery tests.  Don't forget that a a backup that is not tested should be considered non-successful. I also found out that my recovery tests were not diverse enough. When I started this project, I knew a little bit about REST APIs, and nothing about JSON processing. With the Networker REST API documentation, and the help of a friend and Networker Support staff, I was able to create HTTP queries with Postman,  cURL and jq . Once I got the queries that I needed, I put them in a bash script that would somehow select one backup, and then restore it. My first attem...
Read more