Featured articles

Returning to Rails in 2026: Building a modern application with the web framework that shook everything up in the early 2000s.

Haiku Package Management: A tour of the unique package management capabilities of the alternative Haiku Operating System

Amiga Systems Programming in 2023: A look at developing, packaging and distributing software for AmigaOS and derivatives

Recent Posts

Citrix XenServer 5.6 Review

Introduction I’ve been using and evaluating Citrix XenServer now for a while, and felt I should really post a review. I haven’t seen much detailed coverage of this product at the level I’m interested in, so what follows is my take on it from a Unix sysadmin’s perspective. There won’t be any funky screenshots or graphics; instead, I tried to cover the sort of things I wanted to know about when I was looking at it as a candidate for our virtualization solution at work.

Xenserver snapshot and template based backup script

We have recently started using Citrix Xenserver in production at work (fantastic product, see my review for more information) and needed a simple backup solution. Our VMs run from an iSCSI SAN and are backed up daily through various methods - e.g. Bacula for the Unix/Linux systems. However, we wanted the ability to quickly roll back to a previous VM snapshot, and get up and running quickly if our SAN failed for whatever reason. Our solution was to create a large shared NFS...

The setting sun

Well, that’s that, then. Solaris as we knew it is pretty much dead. I’ve suspected for a while now that Oracle’s intentions regarding Solaris were not what the community, or us "old-school" Solaris sysadmins wanted or had hoped for.

Centreon review

One of my favourite interview questions I used to ask candidates was a variation of "Desert Island Discs" : Imagine you are going off to be a sysadmin on a desert island, with no internet access, and further imagine that the previous sysadmin was a total fascist with a minimalist install policy. We’re talking a bare-bones "classic" Solaris installation, or a minimal Debian system here. You’ve got SSH installed, but not much else. Before you hop on the boat, however, you ar...

Cacti iostat scripts now support FreeBSD

Thanks to the awesome work of Boogie Shafer, there is now a FreeBSD port of my iostat scripts and templates for Cacti. I have included the modified tarball that was sent to me, this is inside the archive as "cacti-iostat-1.x-boogie_freebsd_linux_changes.tar.gz".