Category: Sysadmin

System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.

Workaround for Cygwin path issues

A colleague of mine had a problem with his Cygwin setup.  For some reason, he couldn’t just run “mysql” to start his MySQL command-line client.  The error that he was getting back was:

$ mysql
sh.exe: mysql.exe: command not found

Typing the full path to mysql.exe every time is more than annoying.  After searching the web for a bit, I learned that the problem might be with the msys/cygwin terminal, which doesn’t like the backslashes that Windows uses in the PATH variable. I’ve tried a few different variations of setting up the path, but eventually gave up. It just didn’t work.

But since there is more than one way to do it, I solved the problem in a completely different way – an alias.  Just edit the .bashrc file and add the following line:

alias mysql="/c/full/path/to/your/mysql.exe"

Obviously, replace the fake path with the full path to your mysql.exe and restart the terminal.  From now on, every time you type “mysql“, it’ll be like you’ve typed the whole thing again.

P.S.: The same solution is applicable to the other similar problems.

Stash – privately hosted Git repositories

As far as I am concerned, GitHub is the king and queen of applications in the git world.  But it has a downside that is not easy to work around: GitHub Enterprise is expensive.  Keeping code on GitHub infrastructure is not always allowed by authorities and such, and then things get really expensive.  That’s where, I think, Stash can come in.

Stash is a product of Atlassian, the same company that owns Jira, BitBucket, and a few other well-known developer tools.  Given that Stash has only been launched this year, and judging by the screenshots, GitHub probably provides more functionality.  But as I said earlier, GitHub’s price might be simply too high for some companies.

It’s also worth noting that both companies have recently received large investments (Atlassian got $60 million and GitHub got $100 million).  Since private repositories and in-house installations seem to be the primary source of income for both of them, I’m seeing a revved up competition between the two in the nearest future.

Corny network engineer jokes

A colleague sent me a link to this list of network engineer humor.  If you are not a networking guy, you should probably skip altogether, cause these are pretty geeky.  I haven’t got all of them, but a few that I did are actually quite good.

“Knock Knock” “who’s there?” “Denial of Service Attack” “Den…?” “Sn(kRzIhAw]BoKaoOv0liZPhl~FaLoaSa*AgSeaLp|ExleT…” – @MattGordonSmith

An IPv6 packet walks into a bar. Nobody talks to him. @fsmontenegro

A tcp packet walks in to a bar and says “I want a beer”, barman says “you want a beer?” and tcp packet says “yes, a beer” @stevie_chambers

A Network Engineers tell a joke in a full bar. One man laughs. They start talking about NX-OS and have a blast. @icemarkom