This blog is a collection of thoughts, experiences, and technical insights from a sysadmin’s perspective. Here you’ll find posts about system administration, infrastructure challenges, troubleshooting adventures, and the occasional philosophical rambling about technology and its role in our daily work.
Whether you’re a fellow sysadmin looking for solutions, someone curious about the behind-the-scenes work that keeps systems running, or just stumbled upon this corner of the internet – welcome! Feel free to explore, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or want to share your own experiences.
Follow me through my journey through life with all it’s neat little tricks, caveats and side-quests.
Last updated: January 2026
Last month I had this epiphany to fly home for a visit on my mother’s birthday. Well, the idea was great but the implementation kinda sucks. I started my trip around 12:00 AM from work to Stuttgart. Initially I had much more fear of the trip down to Stuttgart, since I have to drive on the A8 (which is kinda infamous for huge traffic jams), but as it turned out; those fears were without reason. It took me an hour to get to Stuttgart, which is fairly normal. ...
My little brother bought himself this fancy netbook (it’s okay I guess, only the keyboard takes getting used to). A few days after he bought it, he told me he wanted something different on it than the shipped Windows XP. At first, I favored a normal Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop. While thats okay, it simply isn’t the right thing for a netbook. Why ? For example, if the programs bar is larger than the vertical desktop resolution, it gets kinda tiring to work with this thing. ...
I’ve been tinkering with VMware’s Data Recovery for the last two weeks (as in configured it some time before Christmas) and had it running all that time. I have to say the integration into the vCenter Client GUI is amazing, I’d love to see that for VCB also. The Changed Block Tracking is a neat way to minimize the amount backup data as well as your backup window (which is nearly zero anyhow due to vDR using snapshots). ...
Yesterday out of a sudden, the sound on my Acer Revo stopped working. Don’t ask me why, I didn’t update anything in between New Years eve and today. Just no sound. Tried removing my .asoundrc, tried rebooting, tried powering off; but nothing worked. Since the Revo was running Jaunty Jackalope, I decided to reinstall the box (yeah, yet again) – but this time with Karmic Koala. Took this forums post and this blog entry as pointer (ie what needed to be installed), and started from there. And guess what … after finishing all that, changing the settings in XBMC – tada sound works. After finishing, I turned the box off and then back on, booted to the “old” installation – guess what .. Sound is working again. I really don’t have a single clue as to why the heck the sound stopped working and the started working without any doing, but I’m glad :-P
I’ve been learning for my VCP-410 exam the last week or so, and what can I say ? It helped … 463 points of a total of 500 points ain’t that bad at all (considering I spend twenty minutes doing it). Sure, I could have spent more time, and do better than 92,6%, but then again: why should I ? The achieved points (nor the percentage) don’t appear on the certificate (or at least it didn’t on the old one), so why bother. Anyway, that was my christmas present to myself, it that light; happy christmas ya’ll.
Some of you may know, that VMware released vSphere 4.0 Update 1 yesterday. I took this as a reason, to finally wrap my head around booting the VMware ESXi installer from my PXE/TFTP box. Since VMware was kind enough to provide (a somewhat worthless) document, that explains how to extract the necessary files on Windows. But that quite doesn’t work with Linux – and VMware just states that you should be using mount and it’s option offset. ...
If you intend to use a custom Keymap.xml with XBMC you might need to be aware of a change that recently happened. Up till now the Keymap.xml was placed in ~/.xbmc/keymaps. Recently (not exactly sure, which svn revision it changed) although it changed. Since r21442 (that’s after the current 9.04.1 release), the default keymapping files are stored in the system/keymaps/ subfolder of your installation. To alter the default keymapping simply add one or more xml-files in the Userdata/keymaps/ folder with the changes you wish to make. If the keymaps folder doesn’t exist, create it. For backwards compatibily, Userdata/Keymap.xml is still read. ...
Since I recently moved, I also needed to make a few changes to my home setup. Up till now, I always had a wall or a border where I could hide the CAT5/CAT6 cable for my boxen. But my new flat has doors everywhere. So I decided to buy two Linksys WUSB600N for my XBMC-box as well as for the NAS-box. The setup was pretty straight forward, I didn’t have to fiddle with it too long. The only thing I had to do, was setup wpa_supplicant in /etc/network/interfaces, as the router supplied by my provider comes with WPA2 enabled (which is a good thing). ...
Since I’m running check_zypper via nrpe (which in turn runs as nobody), I need to set up sudo. In order for the plugin to work, we need to add the following line to /etc/sudoers (by means of visudo): 1 nobody ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/zypper sl, /usr/bin/zypper --non-interactive --no-gpg-checks --terse list-updates (Keep in mind this needs to be a single line …)
I just googled again for a Gigabyte to Blocks converter when I stumbled upon this: 1 echo "(15*1024*1024*1024)/512" | bc Easy to use and yet handy.