Our second Book Club segment will deal with Chapter 3 in The Practice of System and Network Administration. 

First off, a bit of scheduling, due to the Thanksgiving holiday (in the US), were going to push off the next book club segment to the December 9th show.

Back to the book – Chapter 3 deals with workstations.  Our focal questions for this chapter are?

1. Do you know what state your workstations are in? (new, clean, configured, unknown, or off are the suggested state descriptions)
2. Do you have a standard process for rolling out new workstations?
3. How do you load a new workstation? (OS, applications, network configuration)
4. How do you determine when you need to reload a machine?
5. Does your installation process influence your thoughts on when a machine should be reloaded?

If you would like to share your thoughts and views on the chapter and topics, please post your answers as a comment to this blog post or send your thoughts to us at feedback@mindofroot.com.  We’ll share any feedback we receive during our discussion on the podcast.

Recorded: November 11, 2010
Your Hosts: Keith Albright & Steve Murawski
Show Length: 1:17:43

Topics/Links:

• MoR Book Club - Grab the book here: The Practice of System and Network Administration (2nd Ed.)
  • We discuss Chapter 2 - Climb Out Of The Hole
  • SiTracker - Support Incident Tracker software
  • TicketDesk - Support ticket software
  • Chapter 3 next to be discussed - date to be announced
• Debian guest on VMWare - NIC problem solved
• Exchange 2010 Transition - Several links in the show notes.

Read the full show notes here.

Website Picks

Sorry - None this week.

Download Here

Recorded: November 4, 2010
Your Hosts: Keith Albright
Show Length: 35:21

Topics/Links:

• MoR Book Club - Grab the book here: The Practice of System and Network Administration (2nd Ed.)
  • We’ll be starting our discussion with Chapter 2 on the live show Nov.11, 2010.  Read ahead and participate in the discussion.
• Thunderbird email client update
• PortableApps version of Thunderbird
• LSASS error on startup - reload registry from System Restore Point is the fix
• Unable to find eth0 interface in Debian VM on VMWare ESX
• SQL Records disappearing……possibly solved.

Read the full show notes here.

Website Picks

Sorry - None this week.

Download Here

In our first Book Club segment, we start working through The Practice of System and Network Administration (one of my favorite "non-technical" technical books).  We will be starting with Chapter 2 on the podcast on November 11th.  In our book club segments, Keith, Rich, and I will be sharing our thoughts and experiences on the topics covered in the book, but we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts as well.  We’ll be focusing our comments around several questions:

1. How do you manage requests for service?
2. If you are using a trouble ticketing system, which system do you use?  What do you like about it/dislike about it?
3. Do you have policies about how people get help, what the scope of responsibility the systems administrators have, and what defines an emergency?
4. How do you handle operating system loads/reloads (server or desktop)?

If you would like to share your thoughts and views on the chapter and topics, please post your answers as a comment to this blog post or send your thoughts to us at feedback@mindofroot.com.  We’ll share any feedback we receive during our discussion on the podcast.