Charlie Schluting

The future of Solaris is in question. Oracle certainly wants to keep is alive, as many of its database customers run on Solaris, but what about everything else Solaris is used for? The important question is one of strategy: you need to quickly decide if your Solaris usage should be reserved only for the essentials, […]

Recently, Cisco started saying that virtualization doesn’t actually save money due to increased management costs involved with running a virtual infrastructure. Sure, in the same glossy Cisco was selling its “unified computing” system and management tools, but it may have had a point. Sometimes it may seem like running a virtualized environment is more work. […]

An interesting assignment was recently proposed: write about the Interop conference, and more specifically, evaluate whether or not it’s focused on the right things. I reluctantly accepted, knowing that Interop is the type of conference I try to avoid. In the world of *nix systems administration, the conference scene is bleak. USENIX LISA and the […]

What happened to the old “sysadmin” of just a few years ago? We’ve split what used to be the sysadmin into application teams, server teams, storage teams, and network teams. There were often at least a few people, the holders of knowledge, who knew how everything worked, and I mean everything. Every application, every piece […]

The thought of switching a large (or even small) business’s e-mail to hosted providers like Google or Microsoft often meets with a lot of resistance. You might think security would rank as the number one concern, but in practice the big show stopper usually ends up being implementation. Moving millions of old e-mail messages and […]

Standalone wireless access points are a burden to manage. Cisco has a wide suite of centralized wireless controllers available to centralize and manage your thousands of access points as one. In this article, we examine how WLAN management looks in the world of centralized control with Cisco controllers. In the absence of WLAN controllers, configuring […]

We all know we can use open source software without paying, but the real question is: what compels people to buy free stuff? Most widely used free and open source software can also be purchased. We are not speaking of alternative commercial licensing, in this context. We are talking about purchasing support contracts and add-ons […]

You hear it all the time: Xen is not ready to take market share from VMware because it is not as mature a product. Many disagree, because all the core functionality exists in Xen, but it isn’t configurable via a unified GUI. In this article, we explain what maturity means and how you can decide […]

Pain-free networking is the promise that the NetworkManager project makes. NetworkManager ships with most major Linux distributions now and is, by default, enabled at boot time. For mobile laptop users NetworkManager is great, but its usefulness is questionable for desktops and server deployments. This week we will introduce NetworkManager and its features (and drawbacks), followed […]

WANs often need Quality of Service (QoS) configured to ensure that certain traffic is classified as “more important” than other traffic. Until now, it took a serious Cisco guru to configure a network properly for VoIP if the network was at all bandwidth constrained. AutoQoS, a new IOS feature for Cisco routers, makes deploying VoIP […]