system administration

SCaLE accepted my regular expressions talk for Sunday afternoon, Regular Expressions: A guided tour.

SCaLE is in Pasadena at the beginning of March.

It's a great, inexpensive, volunteer run Free Software conference.

My talk is an example driven introduction to regular expressions. It uses plain English to explain regular expression concepts, syntax and language. Common tools such as grep, sed and awk will provide conduits for demonstrating regular expressions.

I'm bookending SeaGL's schedule this year. The first hour of presentations includes my SSH talk and the last hour includes my intermediate Bash talk.

SSH and the shell: go forth securely

Intermediate shell scripting: getting more bash for your $

SeaGL accepted my SSH talk, SSH and the shell: go forth securely.

For the second year in a row I will be heading to Seattle to speak at SeaGL.

I really enjoyed SeaGL last year ( and LinuxFest Northwest north of Seattle the year before ).

SeaGL is a great, intimate Free Software conference. It has much of the greatnesss of SCaLE presentations and hallway track sized so you can meet every attendee.

Linux Journal chose my article about online privacy and security using a password manager as the cover story for this month's edition. You have to be a subscriber to read it right now.

The cover graphic to go with my article could be depicting chop sticks pulling a password out of a data stream, so it's also an article that can be accompanied by Sriracha.

SCaLE accepted my etckeeper talk for SCaLE 15x.

As a system administrator I find it important to track changes in configuration files. Revision control systems have some fatal flaws for tracking /etc/. Luckily Joey Hess' excellent etckeeper wraps several revision control systems and adds the features we need to track our configuration files.

Linux Journal will be publishing my article about Online Privacy and Security Using a Password Manager in the January edition ( pre-emptive URL ). I adapted my talk ( given at LinuxFest Northwest last year ) for print and concentrated more on the password manager aspect.

Thanks to Linux Journal for accepting my article and publishing it.

SEP is Someone Else's Problem, so for SEP 2016 PLUG is covering cloud, which is Someone Else's Computers.

We have two talks about dynamically deploying systems. One is an introduction to OpenStack. The other is an overview on deploying dynamic HA environments with HashiCorp's tools.

SeaGL accepted my MySQL for the System Administrator talk. SeaGL is the middle of November in Seattle.

They haven't yet published the talks, so here's my proposal.

There's always a small database somewhere that gets pushed to system administrators without DBA support. Learn some basic skills for maintaining that database. The same skills will help in the middle-ground between sysadmin and DBA.

Verifying signatures

Debian's CD verification page doesn't explain how to find and use the keyring from the package.

This page will explain how to get the keyring package and use it to verify the gpg signatures for the checksum files if you are running debian. The directions will likely work for any debian-based distribution.

Install debian-keyring ( sudo apt install debian-keyring ). Also install gnupg if it isn't already installed ( see GnuPG sidebar for details ).