In the past weeks I’ve been doing some temporary sysadmin work for my day job and this new role extended to my night-time job. Yeah, I joined a startup but I’ll talk more about that some other day.
I had to move one of the web services we offer in my regular job to its own server. It was a good change, we moved the entire app from a CentOS/cPanel box hosted on the Planet to an instance running Ubuntu on AWS.
CPanel is a really good product and saves you a lot of time but it is a pain in the butt if you are serving more than shared hosting accounts. If you have ever tried to automate tasks that handle virtual domains, email accounts and DNS entries you know what I’m talking about.
Anyway, I must admit that I’m having a blast wearing a sysadmin hat during part of my day. I’m learning a lot. I have this great excuse to read some books that were on my TO READ list for a long time.
One of these books is Pro DNS and Bind by Ron Aitchison. I have had this book on my desk for months but I finally finished reading it. The book gave me a nice introduction to DNS servers, resolvers, zone files, resource records and diagnostic tools. Highly recommended.