I tend to get myself in a twist when delivering work to clients, since timely delivery and profit are important in the greater scheme of things I have taken the time to draw up a little project management template. I present it here to you, use at own risk, but hopefully it is useful to you. Read the rest of this entry »

About a week ago I had the unmitigated pleasure of heading out to a client to do a routine harddrive swop for their backups to be transferred offsite. This is a weekly thing that gets done to keep their data safe.

As I walked in the door the owner of the company (a financial planning business) asked me to check why they had run through their local bandwidth so quickly.

What I found both horrified and amused me.

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I ran out of space on my harddrive today. Serves me right trying to get along with a minimalistic 20gb /home partition.

Instead of trying to install or use a graphic tool to see what was using up the most space I decided I needed a quick script to get a picture of what is going on at /home.

Here is a quick overview of what I did…

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So I havent written anything in a while - being a sysadmin seems to take up a disproportionate ammount of time.

Today my anecdote comes from the land of bad IT practice - and what I have to say here might not seem to be bad practice at first glance, but bear with me. Read the rest of this entry »

So I hit on a cool little applet that will feature quite a bit in my posts these next few weeks: byzanz.

It allows the user to record their desktop and save it to an animated giff file. I decided to use this applet to give you guys a quick weekly tour of the Ubuntu desktop, so here goes:

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You guys will know that I am a flock fan. This is seriously an awesome web browser for the social webofile. Since it is Multimedia Monday I bring you a youtube smorgasbord of Flock goody yumminess.

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This happened to us recently. Today the accountant rushed over to me and asked if I could check why our ADSL usage had spiked. Now the reasons for this happening could be related to any of a ton of reasons.

One of them is stolen account details.

Now living in South Africa - with limited bandwidth thanks to Telkom and their cronies - stolen account details can be problematic. If your cap is maxed out you will soon find yourself without internet access, and if this happened to a business it could seriously mess up a person’s day.

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Hardy Heron comes equipped with Compiz Fusion. If you read my review of Hardy Heron, you will know that Compiz Fusion is somewhat hamstrung by the absence of Compiz-config Manager.

Here’s how to get it, and unleash Compiz Fusion in all its fury on your desktop. Read the rest of this entry »

Right, I promised myself that I would not revert to being a rant blogger in order to get attention. Hence I will keep this as rant free as possible, and as an added bonus I will keep it informative as well - so you could maybe learn something helpful. Read the rest of this entry »

In the last two months I have had the pleasure of working with some interesting scenario’s regarding security needs and the implementing of security practices.

From implementing an open but secured wireless network at a school, to managing webservers for an Internet Service Provider, I have seen a lot in a short time.

What became readily apparent - as I sit here on the couch on a Sunday afternoon - is that security begins and ends with the human factor. Read the rest of this entry »