CCNA for Systems Admins?

Yes, absolutely. Some people will tell you differently, but they are wrong: networking is a core skill for sysadmins. If you aren’t really strong at networking, you absolutely cannot be a good sysadmin (or system engineer, or DevOps engineer, or whatever nom du jour they are rebranding it with today).

More than once I have been unable to promote one of my own team because they have refused to learn or get better at networking. That meant I cannot include these folks in many projects where networking is a core skill because they won’t be able to complete the necessary tasks without tons of outside help. I know networking ain’t easy. But I don’t (and they won’t) get paid 5x the median salary for doing shit that’s easy. If it were easy any mook off the street would be earning that much green.

Learn networking. It’s one of the few skills that’s quite future-proof and has a really great ROI.

Because she’s the best, my partner got this for me for Christmas.

If you need KVM over IP but don’t want to pay the absurd prices charged for any standard solutions (because they are considered enterprise-class gear) the BliKVM works great. It’s about $800 cheaper than the commercial ones with actually decent quality. And it is faster than all those I’ve used too.

It only supports one machine of course, but one virtualization box (with about a dozen VMs on it) is all I’ve got at home anyway that really needs KVM over IP.

The BliKVM is a bit fiddly to get going but once you do it works a treat. Recommended.

The Era of American Computer Magazines Has Drawn to a Close.

Certainly sad. I loved reading those mags during the 80s and 90s. Though I would not want to go back, in many important ways it was a better world — though I do like the quick access to information now. RIP to Byte, Antic, Compute!, PC World, PC Computing, PC Magazine and all the others I used to read during the 1980s and 1990s.

In real ways, they taught me the foundations of what I know now. It was a very different time. Again, as I’ve written about many times before, optimism for the future and the possibilities of human flourishing were still in the air then, and believable. But we allowed corporate greed to destroy what computing was for a while and could have still been now.

Check out this article from the June 1982 issue of Antic. I remember reading this one from back then because it blew my mind that such a thing as getting a newspaper on a computer was possible. That felt so different. Now I dread when something new is released as it’ll be like Firefox or worse (usually worse).

Then, everything got noticeably better all the time. Now it’s just the opposite. I miss the feeling of the era even if I do not miss the relatively-primitive tech.