Can you remember the last time when you had to apply patches or config file changes to a system. And did you have that fingers crossed feeling? Wouldn't it be great that you could install a patch and run a series of tests to see if everything behaved the way it should?

I've been managing systems teams in an Agile environment for a number of years, and after thought and experimentation, I can recommend using an approach borrowed from Lean systems management, called Kanban.

Here is a detailed example of a fairly typical 2-tier Kanban board, for teams that know the basics of Kanban and are taking their first steps towards implementing it in practice.

A review of the various HA solutions available for MySQL.

Handy notes and tips on squeezing more performance out of your MySQL server.

Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built over Hadoop. It provides tools to enable easy data ETL, a mechanism to put structures on the data, and the capability to querying and analysis of large data sets stored in Hadoop files.

David Mytton of BoxedIce explains how his MongoDB infrastructure works and gives some tips and tricks based on experience running MongoDB in production for several months.

SQL databases are fundamentally non-scalable, and there is no magical pixie dust that we, or anyone, can sprinkle on them to suddenly make them scale.

In this FutureRuby talk, Ilya Grigorik explores Tokyo Cabinet's features such as the key-value store, ordered traversal, attribute search, schemaless data structures,indexing, and scripting with Lua.

The two most important part of this talk is the observation that Dev, Qa and Operations teams have to slightly blend into each other to achieve deployments at such a velocity, and the fact that they are not afraid to break the website by deploying code from trunk.

How to set up continuous integration testing for Puppet manifests.

It's important to realize that the tools you use are largely independent of the integration strategy you use. Although many people associate DVCSs with feature branching, they can be used with CI. All you need to do is mark one branch on one repository as the mainline. If everyone pulls and pushes to that every day, then you have a CI mainline. Indeed with a disciplined team, I would usually prefer to use a DVCS on a CI project than a centralized one.

How to set up continuous integration testing for Puppet manifests.

Deployment is definitely one of the places where the rubber meets the road. In some organizations, deployment of new code can be the single-most stressful and dividing parts of their work.

Devopsdays was a small conference about a couple of emerging themes combining Development and Operations.

Hilarious Monty-Python-mashup video explaining the devops movement.

Using these tools should help you build more reliable and less noisy cron jobs, which makes your systems more reliable and your pager more quiet.

A “design pattern” is a little bit of knowledge that is worth sharing, and useful for repeating. For example, the design pattern of “a network” or “active-active redundancy” or “RAID-0″ or “helpdesk”. Ever visit an IT shop where there was no way for people to get help? I have. So I explained the design pattern of a “helpdesk” and without having to re-invent the wheel, they were able to implement one.

Version control and other development best practices which sysadmins should use.

For years, IT pros have heard that they must do more with less, as staffing is cut and outsourced, while demands to better serve the business and adopt new technologies continually increase. This is how it’s always been, but it doesn’t have to be how it always will be.

Let's face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work.

Many of my former Go students headed to Berkeley and Stanford, chose computer science major, and became software engineer. At the minimal, Go will calm a person down and teaches him/her to concentrate for a long period of time.

Lock-picking will teach you to be humble and not focus on what others can do better, but to take an honest inventory of your skills and your progress.

Here are a few things you need to tweak in order to improve OpenSSH server security.

DNS Knife is a good tool to check if your DNS setup is ok, it checks the parent servers, it checks for if your nameservers are listed on the parent server, checks if all your nameservers are reachable and are authoritative. And so on and so on...

A simple command-line tool to be able to grab real-time stats from memcache.

A large crowdsourced list of sysadmin diagnostic tools available on Linux.

think it makes sense to use a tool like Puppet for the initial configuration of the OS and of the packages required by your application. When it comes time to deploy your application, I think a tool like Fabric is more appropriate.

So far, my biggest problem with Nagios has been finding the time to add new systems to it, figuring out what services to check, etc. It’s not a particularly difficult thing to do, but in the grand scheme of things, it was just something that always fell by the wayside in the drive to get more systems set up, deal with user problems, and put out the inevitable fires. That is, until recently.

How to set up continuous integration testing for Puppet manifests.

People complain that Puppet is non-deterministic. On a certain level that is like complaining that threads are non-deterministic. That’s the way the model works by design. If there is logic that depends on the order of execution, that code needs mutex/syncronization. Threads create issues, but they also solve some.

Setting up a staging environment for your modules, manifests and files on the puppetmaster. Test your modules, manifests, templates files and facts before deploying on production servers.

Kokki is a configuration management framework inspired by Chef.

Moonshine is an opensource configuration management and deployment system that follows the Rails way, simplifying server configuration, dependency management, and Rails application deployment, using Ruby and Puppet.

slaughter is a simple tool which will allow policies to be downloaded, via HTTP, from a central server and executed upon a local machine. The intention is that these local policies may be written in a portable fashion and used to automate the administration of a large number of Linux machines.

Sprinkle is based on capistrano and uses the same push model without any additional infrastructure.

Movist is a fast and user-friendly media player for OS X, based on FFMPEG and Quicktime.

SynergyKM is a GUI wrapper around the synergy command line tool that lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems without special hardware.

Drucumber is a new module that converts native-language like text into a Drupal Simpletests. The goal of this module is to allow end-users and project teams to implement behavior driven development: specify behaviors or features of a Drupal site in a test and never again worry about checking it.

n the two years since I've used Mollom, the service probably has blocked more than 100,000 pieces of spam from being posted at my site.

Basically it adds a hidden form element which your users won't see, but automated spambots will. If anything is placed in the textfield, validation fails. So instead of making the user prove that they are human, we allow the spambot to betray itself as a bot.

There are many ways to improve the performance & scalability of Drupal. Comparison of a selection of performance and scalability modules.

Lifetime Digital case study highlights the proven scalability and performance of Drupal websites in a high traffic environment. By utilizing Akamai technology for caching of rich media and for anonymous users, Lifetime Digital's 6 Drupal sites have proven successful in supporting 50 million page views per month.

As anyone who has developed a Drupal site with devel module’s query logging on can tell you, a Drupal implementation can quickly get out of control when it comes to hammering the database.