For the past 10 years I have been doing system administration and have benefited greatly from search engines and forums, but I have not provided much content. I am trying to correct this by creating this blog and participating in online forums.
Time will tell if I can keep it up.
I needed a way to allow our admins responsible for patching to include VMware Tools updates during a patch cycle. You can easily update via Virtual Center, but this requires multiple interfaces and it can be difficult to pick all of the same servers without making a mistake. I fired up Process Explorer and watched what VMware did with their existing tools update process. This is pretty cool since it does not require a network connection and your Tools install is up to date without needing to maintain a repository.
“C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\VMwareToolsUpgrader.exe” -p “/s /v\”/qn /L*v C:\Windows\Temp\ToolsUpgrade.log\”"
It is interesting to read about more formal approaches to system administrator education. I have been reading “Master Education Programmes in Network and System Administration” from the LISA 07 proceedings. The authors’ approach is an interesting one, but I wonder what we do for all of the administrators already “in the wild”? A training vs. education mentality and the difficulty of adult education make introduction of a program like this very difficult.
The program also seems to be self-selecting. How can we set the standard so these types of skills will become more mainstream instead of a small number capable of formal analysis? Are employers going to see the value in this becoming mainstream and be willing to pay for the advanced level system administrators?
I was looking into Cisco Discovery Protocol details and read that you can negotiate POE using CDP packets. Could a malicious trojan forge some CDP packets and energize the POE link to the PCs nic?
I am new to blogging, but I figured that creating an online persona is a good thing.