Chris J

Online Articles

Using Solaris SMF
O'Reilly and Associates, Apr 2006
A brief introduction on how to administer a Solaris 10 environment. It's written for Unix administrators that are more used to RC script environments and how they can get a handle on using SMF to control their systems.
Writing Apache's Logs To MySql
O'Reilly and Associates, Feb 2005
This article was kind of a follow-up to the blackbox article. It was pretty good, but I still have some doubts about whether piping logs to a database is really a good idea. But there are about 3 different Apache modules that do this functionality, so I guess there is some demand for it.
Profiling LAMP Applications with Apache's Blackbox Logs
O'Reilly and Associates, Apr 2004
I had this idea on ways you could try and get better performance metrics just by using logging directives that are available in the mod_log module that nobody ever uses. This is the resulting article.
Managing Bulk DNS Zones With Perl
O'Reilly and Associates, Nov 2002
A programming example covering how to build DNS for large forward and reverse IP blocks. The code generates unique hostnames and is very suitable for netblocks that do not fall on an octet boundary. I wrote a full program to automate the DNS zone building techniques mentioned in this article. Also, I do know that there are a couple of typos in the document, including a never ending while loop code example. I've had a couple of problems submitting changes to the editors.

Print Articles

Designing A Scalable News Server Network
SysAdmin Magazine (Dec 2000)
Advice on how to expand a network of NNTP servers. My first published article ever.
A Framework For Jumpstart Begin/Finish Scripts
SysAdmin Magazine (Oct 2001)
Probably my favorite article. This came from the work I did rebuilding a Jumpstart environment that resulted in a three-fold performance increase in network install time.
Instant Messaging With Jabber
SysAdmin Magazine (Jan 2002)
A brief rundown on the Jabber server, how to install it, and a few useful features that would be beneficial to sysadmins.