Kyle Brandt

I have switched jobs and am now working for Stack Overflow. This is an exciting position for me as I have been following the two co-founders Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky for a while now. As part of my new job I will be writing articles on the Official Serverfault Blog and already wrote my first article about using fault tree analysis as a system administrator.

Server Fault is a question answer site for system administrators and has built a nice community of some dedicated system administrators who are serious about what they do. Next time you have a system administration or networking questions I recommend you head over there and ask a question!

I remotely administer Cisco routers, which can be a bit stressful since I need make sure not lock my self out by do something like removing a NAT command, editing ACL, or screwing up a VPN tunnel. A Cisco support person pointed out to me that I can use the reload command to schedule reboots, so if I lock myself out, I just have to wait until that timer runs out. If I don’t need it, I can cancel the scheduled reload. So, before you start running, copy the running configuration if you are happy with it using ‘copy run start’. Then you can use this trick as follows:

Lab1#copy run start
Destination filename [startup-config]?
Building configuration...
[OK]
Lab1#reload in 8
Reload scheduled in 8 minutes by console
Reload reason: Reload Command
Proceed with reload? [confirm]y
Lab1#
Lab1#show reload
Reload scheduled in 7 minutes by console
Reload reason: Reload Command
Lab1#reload in 12
Reload scheduled in 12 minutes by console
Reload reason: Reload Command
Proceed with reload? [confirm]y
Lab1#show reload
Reload scheduled in 11 minutes by console
Reload reason: Reload Command
Lab1#reload cancel
***
*** --- SHUTDOWN ABORTED ---
***
Lab1#show reload
No reload is scheduled.
Lab1#

Notice in line 13 you can reset or bump up the timer. And you can always use ’show reload’ to see how much time you have. Of course, now you have to be careful not to let the timer run out or forget to remove it.

I use Statcounter and Google analytics to keep track of what articles people are actually looking for. One thing that also gets tracked is where the people are that are visiting. Some of my corporate and government readers in the past month are:

NSA/NCSC
Navy.mil
DISA.mil
Cisco Systems
Raytheon
Boeing
Lockheed Martin
ITA software
Fidelity
Sun Microsystems
DreamWorks Animation
Deutsche Bank
IBM
Intel

Almost all of my traffic comes from Google searches.