The Lone Sysadmin

“How big is your virtual environment?”

I love that question. Find a virtual environment and ask ten people who work on it, and they’ll give you ten different answers. “It’s pretty big,” one person will say. The next person will say “oh, we’re small.” The next two people asked will argue with each other until you shake your head and walk away. It’s all relative, too. If most guys you know have 50 virtual machines, and you have 200, you’re big, relatively-speaking. You’ve got problems they don’t have, and you’d probably like to talk with others that have had those same problems. Talking to a guy who has 2000 VMs isn’t going to help you much, though. He’s operating at a whole different scale, size, and budget level.

I spent some time this morning answering questions for a fellow who wants to build a large virtual environment. He didn’t have a lot of specifics to start with, but was really balking at what I was suggesting he look into for storage, servers, etc. As it turns out, “large” to him was really only 50 virtual machines in the next three years. That’s a big difference from what I perceive as large, which means many thousands of dollars, different storage and software strategies, completely different P2V approaches, etc.

As such, I propose some simple terminology, based on a logarithmic scale, to help sort out sizing:

I have 300 virtual machines, so I consider myself to be medium-sized. When I get to 1000 VMs I’ll be large.

Complexity is a whole different problem. From a complexity perspective my environment is pretty simple. The thing is, someone can take a small environment and make it really complex. And some of the biggest environments I’ve seen have been pretty simple, overall. It’s only scale I’m proposing labels for.

At any rate at least I have a graph to point to when I’m talking about this stuff. :-)

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• Anonymous Pro
  Cool, might have to check this out.
  (tags: revisit-font)
• Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson – THE DEFINITIVE INDEX – The Sims 3
  "Are you lost in a sea of Edward Cullen's and can't decide which one to download? Are you thinking, "Geez, I wonder if anyone has made an Edward Cullen yet."? Have you been dreaming of making an entire town just of Edward Cullens? Or are you just feeling like if you see yet another Edward Cullen you will implode!? Below are the 140+ Edward Cullen/Robert Pattinson sims made since launch. Click on the picture you like and it will link you to its download page. My favs are by knox and fieryfemale. How about yours?" OMFG.
• AT&T signals an abrupt end for prepaid iPhone plans
  Apple and AT&T are turning out to be a bunch of bastards. This, coupled with no MMS, coupled with terrible iPhone 3Gs upgrade options, coupled with App Store anti-developer practices make me wonder about the future of the iPhone.

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I’m on my way to Peru (hooray for vacations!). In preparation for the hike on the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu I needed to get a new sleeping bag. My old one, a Coleman bag circa 1892 or so, was lost to the Appalachian Trail (AT) last fall. Which was fine, since it was heavy. Really heavy. And not super warm, either, which I discovered when the AT turned into a winter wonderland. 60° and sunny? Nope!

Picking a new sleeping bag is sort of daunting. You’ve got a number of different materials, shapes, and sizes to choose from. What impressed me, though, is recent efforts to simplify temperature ratings for consumers. The new EN 13537 standard actually takes into account the differences between men and women, and then expresses it in an easy to read label:

This is exactly the way a label should be: clear, consise, and informative, telling you exactly what you need to know. If you know your gender and what temperature you want to sleep in you can instantly eliminate temperature from the choices you need to make (down vs. synthetic, regular vs. long, etc.).

As an IT guy that works very hard to simplify things for himself, coworkers, and customers it’s nice to see other industries doing the same. As a result I’m much more confident that the sleeping bag I spent $250 on is going to do exactly what I need it to, when I need it to. Which is always my goal when I’m simplifying IT processes, too.

REI has a nice article on the new standards, and in case you’re curious I bought the Marmot Sawtooth Long.

See you all in two weeks!

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Some friends of mine and I have been following Alice Peacock for years. I’m not quite sure anymore how we got started listening to her, but she’s great. You may have heard her songs on the radio, or on a Hershey’s chocolate commercial. I saw her in Madison, WI last Friday. I didn’t have her newest CD so I bought one. Being me, I decided I didn’t want her to sign it in the same way every artist signs a CD, and so:

Nice!

It’s cool what happens when you ask people to do something a little bit differently.

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At least once a day I have this conversation, usually with one of the same four people:

“Hey Bob, do you know what ‘pam_tally(sshd:setcred): unknown option: no_magic_root’ means?”

“Have you tried searching for the answer yourself?”

“No. Why?”

<uncomfortable pause goes here>

As such, I adore the creators of “Let Me Google That For You.”

http://lmgtfy.com/

(hat tip to my friend Terry Bradshaw for finding this one).

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For months now my Windows Vista, and now Windows Server 2008 desktop has been losing its default printer every night. I haven’t been able to figure it out until now: it’s the Remote Desktop Client remapping my printers when I connect from home.

There are three fixes for this:

1. You can tell your RDP client to not map printers, in the “Local Resources” options tab. This is easy but you have to remember to do it.

2. On the host side on Windows Server 2008 you can go into Administrative Tools->Terminal Services->Terminal Services Configuration, right click the RDP-TCP connection, pick “Properties,” and disable it under the “Client Settings” tab.

3. On the host side on Windows Vista you can follow Microsoft KB article 268065 and add a registry value in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\Wds\rdpwd.

Now you know, and as they say in G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.

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• Sports: Seven years after starting to pump iron again, Madison's Jim Ray owns a world record
  I bet you folks don't work with a world record holder. :-) I've actually been lucky to work with two. Jim Ray, the world's strongest sysadmin, and Joe Detmer, the world's fastest sysadmin (he has, or at least had, a running record in the decathlon).

Popularity: 4% [?]

Q: What’s the easiest way to get rid of malware on Windows[0]?

A: Not to get it in the first place.

A couple of other observations I made while cleaning a friend’s computer:

1. The malware was detected by my friend because it was closing windows. Any window that could be used to fix the infection was closed by the malware. That doesn’t seem to be a very productive strategy for staying installed.

2. The Avast BARTPE CD creator rocks. Luckily, a part of my organization that does more desktop support for customers has a license for it. It’s really nice to boot off a CD to fix everything.

3. I started with the Avira free antivirus scanner. It is worth what you pay for it. I couldn’t get it to switch to the right screen resolution so I could see the buttons to trigger a scan, the English edition is in German, and there are no command-line utilities that work (or documentation to indicate what I should be doing). In the immortal words of Maddox: Terrible. F.

4. I really like how malware authors are taking out ads for antivirus products on Google. Search for “avast” or “avira” and the sponsored links at the top of the results are not reputable sources…

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[0] Pre-emptive snarky comment: “Windows sux!” or “Linux wouldn’t have this problem” or “Apple r00lz!” — yes, we know, in a perfect world you’d be the benevolent emperor and would require everyone to use some other far-superior OS.[1]

[1] All OSes suck.

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