Go to Bed

2013 Jan 02, Timid Robot Zehta (Troubleshooting, Emotional Intelligence)

One of my own troubleshooting or programming rules is to go to bed. Over and over again, I have discovered that I will fail to solve a problem if I focus too stubbornly on it. If I go to bed, however, the answer is usually waiting for me as soon as I wake up or pick up the problem again.
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Mystery Writes

2012 Nov 01, Timid Robot Zehta (Systems Administration, Linux, Troubleshooting)

We recently observed constant write activity on our development server, while watching dstat. With the help of iotop (iotop), we identified the Apache web server was the culprit.
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The Automation of Networks of Networks

2012 Oct 10, Timid Robot Zehta (Automation, Systems Administration)

For me, at least, systems administration is a difficult field to define and talk about--especially succinctly. A couple of excellent blog posts suggest the following definition for Systems Administration: the automation of networks of networks.
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Isolating SSD Firmware Issue

2012 Oct 03, Timid Robot Zehta (Troubleshooting)

On Friday 2012-09-28, my MacBook Pro started freezing. There had been no significant software updates that morning (though 10.8.2 came out that week).

I didn't want to deal with it, so I took it to the Apple Store. Unfortunately, they simply wasted a few days (given the solution found, I'm confident they never let it run more than an hour).
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Linux TCP/IP Tuning

2012 Oct 03, Timid Robot Zehta (Linux, Systems Administration)

There is a lot of interesting information in this article and related comments: Linux TCP/IP Tuning | Hacker News. I look forward to eventually having systems that benefit from that granularity of tuning.