By Bob Plankers on May 31, 2007 in People Stuff, System Administration | 2 Comments
Number of staff from my group in your meeting: 2
Number of meetings you have per year: 50
Scheduled length of meeting (what you get billed for): 1 hour
Average actionable/discussable agenda items per meeting: 0.25 (once a month)
Total cost to you for us to attend: 2 * 50 * $80 = $8000
Total cost to you for monthly meetings: $2000
Savings: $6000.
Your team’s budget shortfall (which started this whole discussion): $3000
Amount you still save after the shortfall is removed: $3000.
By Bob Plankers on May 31, 2007 in System Administration | 1 Comment
Some of my coworkers believe that accounts should never be deleted, just locked.
Some of my coworkers believe that accounts should always be deleted.
I like a combination of the two. First, lock the account. This should tell you if there are programs running as the user, crontab entries, etc. After a few weeks remove the account. If the account is gone there is no chance it’ll get unlocked somehow, get hacked, send spam, conflict with another UID, or make your life difficult in the future.
By Bob Plankers on May 29, 2007 in System Administration | 3 Comments
Hey web,
I am doing a Nagios deployment. I need to decide on hardware, but I can’t. In short, do I run Nagios on a Sun T2000 or a Dell PowerEdge 2950?
It’d be Nagios 2.9, with about 30,000 services monitored (500 hosts * 60 service checks).
The T2000 would be something like eight 1 GHz cores (32 “CoolThreads”), 8 GB RAM, etc. with Solaris 10. The 2950 would be something like dual quad-core Intel X5355s, 8 GB RAM, etc. with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.
Is there anybody out there that has anything to say either way about this? The only information I can find about Nagios on a T2000 is an old white paper about OpsWare, and they conclude that the app isn’t multithreaded enough to take advantage of it.
I’d really appreciate any advice. Thanks!
…Bob
By Bob Plankers on May 29, 2007 in System Administration | 2 Comments
It seems like everybody has their own idea of the best way to name computers. Some people like functional names, like HQPRINT01 or MSP-SALES. Some people like unique names, like LARRY, VOLTRON, or STRONGBAD. I like to mix the two, with each host getting a unique name plus any “service” names it might need for customer interaction. That way if I repurpose a machine, or add a service, I can just give it a new service name. Likewise, if I move a service I can move the DNS entry for the service without having to reconfigure every client.
Regardless of what you like individually a sysadmin team should have a clear policy about naming things, so names are uniform. RFC 1178 has some naming suggestions, but here are the rules I try to follow:
- Each computer gets a unique name, plus service DNS A records. If you aren’t a sysadmin use service names for absolutely everything.
- Use a single word. Shorter is better, spelled accurately and as it sounds, begins with a letter, only alphanumeric.
- No duplication of pronunciation. If you have a server named CHECK then the name CZECH is out.
- Use hyphens for separators. I like hyphens more than underscores because they are easier to see and marginally easier to type.
- If the service name is to include a role do so after the name, using a hyphen to separate them. For example, if you have wiki.companyname.com use wiki-dev for development, wiki-test for testing, and wiki-db for the database service name. This makes them quite sortable and predictable. It also keeps your developers from having to remember that LARRY is production, CURLY is test, and MOE is development.
- Use a naming scheme per project. Pick one that is adequately sized for the number of servers, small or large. Even if you don’t know offhand what the server BIRCH does you can tell it’s your coworker Greg’s machine because his project uses tree names.
- If you have a cluster where every machine will be identical use numbers. ROCKS-01, ROCKS-02, ROCKS-03, etc.
The RFC suggests against overloading terms, but personally I like names like UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, etc. It makes my coworkers and I speak more accurately about things. I also always capitalize server names, so that helps.
Server names are where sysadmins can be creative, but use that creativity to an advantage, not to confuse. Consistency is always the goal.
By Bob Plankers on May 25, 2007 in General Rambling | 0 Comments
Hey everybody,
It’s beautiful here in Stillwater, MN, sitting on my mother’s deck working on not looking like a ghost. I’m in the Cities for another day, having come up for a funeral, and sticking around to see my family.
Today was dedicated to planting trees. At my house in Madison I have huge maple trees, and I have maple seedlings as weeds. They grow everywhere, given the thousands of helicopters that issue forth every May. My mother has five acres of land, some of which is devoid of trees. So it’s a perfect match, I weed and save them, then replant them in her yard. This time I had, oh, 40 of them or so. The trick to planting trees is to imagine what they’re going to look like in 20 years. You don’t want to plant them in rows, you don’t want to get them too close to each other, and you want to be mindful of the bushes and other plants growing up. You also want to leave open space so all the woodland creatures can flourish.
Transplanting is stressful on trees, so we hedged a little and put a handful of helicopters in the hole with each tree. With the GF driving the lawn tractor and me manning the shovel we machined through the task. Find a good spot, mow a hole in the weeds, dig a hole, insert tree, add some dirt, add helicopters, fill the hole with water, fill the water with dirt, play in mud, wash, rinse, repeat.
Now it’s time to go offline for a while, so have a great Memorial Day weekend! Enjoy it and remember to thank your veterans for their service.
…Bob
