Rich Jerrido

In my lab, I use the Linux SCSI target framework (tgtd) to provide iSCSI storage to my virtual machines, physical servers and RHEV farm. One of my biggest operational challenges is resizing iSCSI volumes to increase/decrease space. This guide aims to document those challenges, and how I addressed them.

I took my final exam (EX442 – Red Hat Enterprise System Monitoring and Performance Tuning) for RHCA certification yesterday, and got my e-mail notification that I passed earlier today! I am definitely relieved that it is over. There was a metric ton of material that one needed to be proficient on. But I would put [...]

Recently, I had a requirement to migrate a system running RHN Satellite 5.3 with the embedded database from a host running RHEL4 i386 to another host running RHEL5 x86_64. Looking through the various documents included in the rhn-upgrade package on RHN, I noticed that there wasn’t a procedure available for the upgrade we were planning. [...]

This past Friday, I took (and passed ) the EX318 exam. Woohoo, 4 of 5 in my quest for RHCA completed. This exam was a pretty important one in the series for me. Passing it granted me the following certifications: Red Hat Certified Datacenter Specialist (RHCDS) Red Hat Certified Virtualization Administrator (RHCVA) Though Red Hat, [...]

Now that I am back at 127.0.0.1 from the crazy week known as the Red Hat Summit, I guess I’ll post my quick review of the event. Overall, I was very impressed by the events and the various presentations. It was very helpful to get out of the office, take off my flame-retardant suit, and [...]

After 6 days of waiting with high anticipation, I got my results of my recent taking of EX333 after taking RHS333 this past week. I passed, but that was one pretty intense exam. Obviously, I cannot divulge the details, but it was exactly what I was expecting from Red Hat: Good practical application using live [...]

iSCSI is one of those protocols that has a special place in my bag of tricks. In the lab it allows one to simulate some pretty complex infrastructures. In the field, it allows a very cost-effective alternative to “traditional” SAN solutions such as Fibre Channel. Additionally since iSCSI is transported over IP, all the cool [...]

With the existence of collision vulnerabilities within the MD5 hashing algorithm, it is a very good time for us sysadmins to start looking at migrating our systems over to stronger hashes. Granted, if a miscreant can read /etc/shadow on any of your systems, you’ve already lost. But considering that the change to replace MD5 with [...]

I have been sitting here thinking about some of my career options. Much of my Linux career I have been designing & deploying solutions based on Red Hat’s product line. And the more and more that I think about it, I think that it is in my best interests to finally quantify that experience. Additionally, [...]

I have been on a mission to convert many of my older filesystems from Ext3 to Ext4 in order to get many of the advanced features. One of the biggest features that is on my “must-have” list are extents, which allow much better large file performance as well as making it harder to fragment an [...]