System Administration
7 tips for aspiring systems administrators who also like to sleep at night
Nobody likes to get a call in the middle of the night that the company web site is down, or worse, hacked. It’s one of the key reasons why businesses often choose managed hosting solutions, after all. Of course, not all web sites can be run by someone else and in many cases administrating your […]
Who Still Needs Colocation?
Cloud hosting has been getting a lot of press in recent years. It’d be easy to assume that everything is going to “the cloud.” With promises of lower CAPEX and higher elasticity, some business owners might feel obligated to move everything over. But is that the best choice for all organizations? Statistically, most companies still […]
Announcing secrets.xmission.com – A Self Destructing Encrypted Notes Service
Today, XMission launched https://secrets.xmission.com, our new free, publicly available service to fight off Big Brother, snooping individuals, hackers, and adversaries. Background Off and on for a few years, I had been toying with the idea that I wanted the general public to have access to 100% transparent encryption, repudiation, and deniable plausibility. I am a […]
Disaster Recovery Finally Affordable for SMBs
Any company that relies on computers to store and process data should understand the importance of backups. Unfortunately, many small and medium-sized businesses feel overwhelmed at the prospect and don’t know how to proceed. Sound familiar? Thanks to free and easy to use software, sensible off-site backups for disaster recovery can now be accomplished cheaply […]
Building a Stratum 1 NTP Server with a Raspberry Pi
Introduction I wanted to build my own NTP stratum 1 time server. An NTP server is a server that connects to the Internet to serve time to clients who can use that time to adjust the clock on their computer. NTP uses stratum levels to determine the distance from the source clock. A stratum 0 […]
The Salt of XMission
As system administrators at XMission, we hold to the Three Great Virtues of programmers, immortalized by Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, but adapted for admins: Laziness– The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving scripts and configs that other admins will find useful, […]
8 Easy Steps to Integrate Zimbra with MS Outlook 2013
Hot on the heels of the new Microsoft Outlook 2013 comes the barrage of support calls dealing with broken emails that go something like… “Help! I upgraded to Outlook 2013 and now my email is broken.” Our techs have you covered! In just minutes you will be good as new because in addition to providing awesome […]