Welcome to BAFM#
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.
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Last updated: January 2026
As I have quite some trouble every time I need grub via serial console, here’s just my personal reminder on how to do it right:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 # cat /boot/grub/grub.conf serial --unit=0 --speed=38400 terminal --timeout=15 console serial title hardened-sources-2.6.20-r1 root (hd0,0) kernel (hd0,0)/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.20-hardened-r1 root=/dev/hda1 console=ttyS0,38400 console=tty0 Additionally the agetty entry for ttyS0 in /etc/inittab needs to be uncommented and changed accordingly to the serial speed
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As some of you know, I had some company the last few weeks by two amiable girls from Belgium. We did some hanging out, went out a couple of times and basically had a great time.
One thing I didn’t thought was possible, is them getting close to me (as in “I’d really like them to stay some time”) and as I gave them a ride to the train station yesterday, I really had my problems. Out of the sudden I had a feeling not to let them go, or is it the feeling to let friends (and I’m talking about real friends) slip by, without even knowing them for more than 3 weeks.
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Some of us attended this years FOSDEM in Brussels (thanks to Dimitry it was really, really great).
We (at least the ones attending) got to know each other a bit better (I even got to know some pre Gentoo devs .. yeah, you), and some time after FOSDEM (I think it was ~3 days afterwards), Petteri (betelgeuse) asked me why people all of the sudden start to call him with his first name on IRC.
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OK, today we had somewhat of an emergency. The core-router for our entire network at work had some kind of hardware defect and repeatedly rebooted every three minutes caused the whole network to go cabooom. Usually (you would think), stuff in the same subnet (or VLAN) would still see each other (again, you would think) .. but apparently the VLAN/subnet database is stored on the core router and took all subnets with it.
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OK, so today was the highlight of the week … We updated apache2 on Tuesday (yeah, that’s still 2.0.49, so if you have some exploits - try them 😛 ) and now out of the sudden we have major performance issues. We looked nearly the whole forenoon for a reason, why the frackin’ apache was using 236% of the CPU’s.
In the afternoon, when my co-worker decided to go home (that was ~1500), I decided to revert back to the old patch level. But that isn’t as easy as you think (at least on SLES). The only thing I wanted to do, was something like this:
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We are still waiting for the money promised by the state and the country for our HBFG (again, it’s “Hochschulbauförderungsgesetz”), that hopefully is reducing or eliminating our storage/SAN problem we have currently. Right now we have to Cisco MDS9216 (that’s a 16-port 2GBps SAN-switch, two for redundancy), which means we only have 16 SAN-ports. That isn’t much, but still is to less, as we have like 30 machines or so, that really need access to the SAN, so we either end up unplugging some of them from the SAN or merge them onto some big machines (like our x366).
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OK, I’m sitting now again in train (hrm, I get the feeling I’ve done that already in the last few days - oh wait, I was doing that just on Monday) this time to Berlin.
My boss ordered me to attend a workshop covering the implementation of Shibboleth (for those of you, who can’t associate anything with that term - it’s an implementation for single sign-on, also covering distributed authorization and authentication) somewhere in Berlin Spandau (Evangelisches Johannesstift Berlin).
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OK, as some of you have noticed; I prepared my box for the new toolchain, recompiled the stuff Kevin mentioned in the exact same order wrote down in his README, and it looks like it actually works with all my stuff I have on my box; except sys-libs/grub! sigh
Apparently, grub segfaults at boot and/or while running it from the chroot in the exact same spot, the new QA warnings complain about ..
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The last three days have been quite amazing, I’m still stunned by all these impressions (basically meeting all those people you usually know though IRC), how nice people can be if they want (yeah dad, I’m talking about you 😛)
Although I was pretty sad about leaving so early (I think, if I’m going to attend next year, I’m going by train and starting on Monday morning so I got one night more in Brussels), I’m also quite happy to be home again, as I was pretty phreaked (haha, self-pun intended) by all those people.
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Today, I got up again at 0630 ugh went to bath, woke up Torsten, afterwards the mystery guy and went downstairs to get some breakfast. I ate some cornflakes and some bread along with a glass of chilled orange juice, then went back up to get all our stuff and prepare the room the way we found it.
After we finished that, we went downstairs and met Alex along the way went to the cars and Torsten led us to the university. I went to the booth and noticed that Torsten and me where the only ones that early at the booth. So we sat down for a moment, cleaned up the booth space a bit and finally sat again preparing the notebooks.
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