Mother nature will kill you first chance she gets, and one of her best tools to do so is with water. Drowning is widely regarded as the #1 nature related cause of death World Wide. (Katrina, Asia Tsunami’s etc.) Water is powerful, and relentless. Fortunately, it is also predictable. On a calm, good day it’s […]

You can’t always control how things happen, but you can always own how you react to it. As chaotic, unpredictable and ultimately violent as the initial surprise or event may be, whatever it may be, by staying calm and focused you can usually direct, identify and plan for the outcome. Life shouldn’t go your way, […]

Configure, Make & Make Install. The basic roadmap for compiling a package from source, and installing on a *nix box. it’s clean, efficient and works. It’s also kinda cool to see all the lines of text scrolling through your chosen Unix shell. Take that Microsoft InstallShield Wizard!! Except this time. I was recently tasked with […]

Here’s a short video I did for an organization I’ve taught a few SAR related classes to. (ZERT.) ZERT is a pretty cool organization that uses ‘Zombie’ as a metaphor for anything that can go wrong, and they openly share info and offer training in all sort of disaster / emergency type scenarios.  Their instructors are […]

Every time I teach a new group of Search & Rescue candidates I include this lesson. The lesson is about the most important piece of gear they will carry. It’s always a lot of fun – here’s how it goes. I start by rounding up my gear, some team gear, and fellow instructor gear and […]

Salt / SaltStack is a tool one can use to handle remote execution of code, deployments and other configuration or maintenance across hundreds or thousands of servers.  It’s command line / shell based, quick, simple and effective.  It uses a Master / Minion setup where commands are issued from the Master to all the Minions. […]