I saw a reference to a site on one of my emails or feeds earlier that gave this URL: http://www.quora.com/Linux/What-are-some-time-saving-tips-that-every-Linux-user-should-know

In a fit of “might be something out there”, I had a look and discovered a bash built-in that I had never run across before, disown. Take a look at the bash manpage for this little gem, but the nutshell version is that it will take a command that you either forgot to run nohup on or screen before you ran it and with some optional parameters, you can take a long running process, background it, run disown -h <jobid> and all of a sudden, you can disassociate the job with your terminal, allowing it to ignore SIGHUP and continue on even if you log out. While I am aware that there are other mechanisms, exiting a remote session and having ssh wait for exit is annoying. I know you can type ~& to background, but which level of ssh are you backgrounding?

We had a small turnout tonight, but that made it somewhat more casual (if that’s possible). Most of the discussion was about the LISA 2010 conference which two of us attended. As I have previously mentioned, it was a great conference and a lot of interesting things were presented. I think the most interesting item was the pervasive social media. Twiter, IRC, facebook, etc. were all in constant use. While this isn’t really a new phenomenon, this is the most blatant use I’ve seen.I suspect that this is a pretty common thing in schools and universities now, but it wasn’t when I went.

LISA'10 is over and there are stories to tell. There is a new program started up with LOPSA and the training sessions were great. The hallway track was quite good although this year it suffered a bit from the incessant tweeting that was going on. It’s hard to make progress on something when the pop-up indicator on your screen is (almost) constantly lighting up with a new comment.

There are two additional conferences happening in 2011. PICC in New Jersey and the Cascadia IT Conference in Seattle. These are sponsored by sysadmin groups, like the LOPSA-NJ chapter and the Seattle Area System Administrators Guild there is obviously an audience for these conferences, so if you have the time and inclination, check it out and possibly attend. I have also been informed that BSDCan will be going ahead this year, with the older format of two days of tutorials and two days of presentations, the second being on a Saturday. I’m the volunteer coordinator again, so if you want to assist in the setup, let me know.

Title - November Meeting
Location - The Pythian Group
Link out - Click here
Description - Post LISA'10 meeting.

Note that this is NOT the Third Thursday of November!

I’ll be talking about the conference and some of the more oddball things I have been up to recently. Monitoring will be part of the topic and automated reports that have funky graphs.
Start Time - 19:00
Date - 2010-11-25
End Time - 21:30

I’m going to add a few eBooks (PDF at the moment) to the downloads section. These are GFDL or marketing papers, so I don’t see an issue. They may have some value to you, so feel free to download and have a look.

LISA ‘10 starts next Sunday. That should be a lot of fun and a lot of late nights and early mornings. It’s certainly a busy conference and there is so much to do/see/attend. I’m hoping to at least make a few tweets during the day and maybe even a few blog entries in the evenings between sessions. I’m not sure how well I’ll do, but if I don’t actually post it here, I’ll probably not bother. This way I feel some obligation to pass on info.