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.

IBM To Acquire Red Hat

Here are some huge news to wake up to on this Monday Morning: IBM To Acquire Red Hat, Completely Changing The Cloud Landscape And Becoming World’s #1 Hybrid Cloud Provider.

That’s a lot to process in the morning.  But if Red Hat was to be acquired by someone, I think IBM is one of the better choices.  The deal size is $34 billion … and people are still saying that there is no way to make money with Open Source Software.

Here’s the story at Slashdot, which will get quite a few flame wars as the day progresses.

SOAR – SQL Optimizer And Rewriter

 

SOAR is an SQL Optimizer and Rewriter.  It can help analyse, optimize, and rewrite SQL queries.  Don’t get offset by the Chinese documentation as default – there is an English translation.

Here are some of the features:

  • Cross-platform support, such as Linux, Mac, and Windows
  • Support Heuristic Rules Suggestion
  • Support Complicate SQL Indexing Optimize
  • Support EXPLAIN analyze for query plan
  • Support SQL fingerprint, compress and built-in pretty print
  • Support merge multi ALTER query into one SQL
  • Support self-config rewrite rules from SQL Rewrite
  • Suggestions were written in Chinese. But SOAR also gives many tools, which can be used without understanding Chinese.

And if you are familiar with the other tools that provide similar functionality, here’s how SOAR compares to them:

croc – simple and secure cross-platform file transfer

croc is a very simple but super useful utility, which helps with occasional file transfers between two computers. When you need to send a few files to a friend on another computer or in another country – this might just be the easiest way.  No need to setup HTTP or FTP servers, Samba or NFS shares, or register at one of the million web services that provide such functionality.

croc is written in Go and is compiled for a variety of operating systems, include Linux, Windows, and macOS.  It even has a simple GUI for those who wants it.

up – the Ultimate Plumber

The Ultimate Plumber, or up for short, is an excellent interactive tool for anyone who is building complex command sequences for processing text on the Linux command line.  If you are a frequent user of grep, sort, cut, awk, sed, and other similar commands, have a look at this demo.  I’m sure up will save a tonne of time once you get a hang of it.

The Illustrated TLS Connection

“The Illustrated TLS Connection” is an interactive guide to the TLS connection, explaining every byte with code, comments, annotations, and more.  If you ever wanted to know the details of how this works, I can’t think of a better resource to direct you to.  And if you find any issues or can suggest a better explanation, there’s a GitHub repository for you to contribute.