General Rambling

Why Even Ask?

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“I have some questions about the VMware environment you spec’ed out for us.” “Sure, what’s up?” “Well, you suggested a separate server for the management machine, to run VirtualCenter. Couldn’t we run that in VMware itself?” “I suppose you could, but I think you’d get some chicken-and-egg problems by having the management box inside the managed infrastructure. Personally I think it’s worth the extra money to just avoid them.” “So yes, we can.” A big difference between me a year ago and me now is that if people are going to do dumb things against my recommendations I don’t put up much of a fight. My trying to convince them to do the right thing just made them upset with …

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Four Things About Changes

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I’ve been watching people make changes to servers, OSes, networks, storage, applications, and the like for a while now. I’ve even been one of the people making the changes. There are four properties that every successful change I’ve witnessed has had. 1. The change is atomic. If you are making changes to machines or systems each change should start and finish before you make the next. This keeps the system’s state consistent for other changes, and makes it easy to find what went wrong. If you are making changes to machines or systems each change should start and finish before system maintenance processes, like backups, occur. This way the system’s state is consistent for those processes. 2. The change is …

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Props to Red Hat for Updates 7 and 3

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I have to give props to the folks at Red Hat for their latest update packs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS/ES/WS 3 and 4. In the past there was always at least one nasty surprise in the updates. One update pack nuked our named.conf files. One added the audit subsystem, and turned it on, so that ten days later all, and I mean all, of our machines had full /var/log filesystems (and you couldn’t log in). The last updates added a new ksh package that uninstalled the pdksh that shipped with the OS and replaced it with a really buggy ksh. The old pdksh wouldn’t reinstall unless you removed ksh and installed the pdksh RPM manually. Every time you …

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Recognition

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I love finding a photo I recognize in Flickr. It’s especially odd when it shows up in my Yahoo! Widgets Picture Frame. In this case it’s the UW – Madison’s Memorial Union Terrace, in the fall, when they have all the tables bunched together. Nice shot, Daryl M. Todd Klassy has some great Wisconsin photos, too.

Small Town Music Rethought

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After yesterday’s little rant about small town music purchasing options, I’ve been thinking about it more. Actually, I thought about it a lot as I drove the rest of the way home, and realized three things: 1. Online music stores, like iTMS, Amazon.com, etc. probably do a lot of business with residents of small towns, which obviates any need for better music selections locally. 2. Because of point #1, local businesses never learn what people like because people don’t ask for it. So while it looks like everybody listens to Dokken’s Greatest Hits and country music, that’s only because the person ordering the music has no idea what to order. Since people are passive-aggressive and have low self-esteem they don’t …

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F'in Small Towns

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I am sitting in the parking lot of a motel in Tomah, WI, downloading Daft Punk from iTMS, poaching wireless, because Wal*Mart (yeah, yeah, I know, I’m desperate) had twenty copies of Dokken’s greatest hits but not Daft Punk’s “Homework.” Or any Daft Punk. Daft Punk? Who are they? No Target, no Best Buy, no music store in sight. Where in hell do these folks get their music? And why is it all f’in country and Christian? I mean, I like some Christian rock, but it takes so little effort to see a little bit more in life. God forbid you might like it. WTF. And there was no freakin’ way I was gonna get the new Tool album from …

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Coachella

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I’m finally back in the midwest from my adventures at Coachella and in San Diego. I’m not quite home yet, but that’s just a matter of driving a couple hours. Coachella itself was the bomb. I had no idea what to expect going out there, but the likes of Imogen heap, Sigur Ros, Wolfmother, Franz Ferdinand, Depeche Mode, Atmosphere, and Daft Punk made it worth it. OMFG, Daft Punk. Five acres of jumping, screaming people under a huge light show. Now that was a treat, and only the first day. Gabriel & Dresden, Paul Oakenfold, Editors, Madonna, Massive Attack, and Tool on the second day, not to mention all the other bands that I listened to in passing. Tool was …

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Rube Goldberg, Part 2

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“Hey Bob, big important web server A isn’t working right after you patched it the other day. We need to roll the patches back.” “Can you tell me what’s going wrong first?” “PHP can’t talk to the Oracle databases.” “Does the test environment work?” “Yeah.” “It’s identical to production.” “Um… I don’t get it.” “I put the same patches on the test box that are on the production machine.” I always do. That’s the point. “Well, maybe it’s on a different network.” “What’s on a different network?” “Did big important web server A switch networks?” At this point an alarm is going off in my head. Switch networks? Yeah, I just randomly change the IPs of my servers because it …

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Hold, Fold, Walk Away, Run

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There was a post today over at 37signals about sunk costs that I’ve been thinking about. It’s been rolling around in this skull of mine all day. If you aren’t familiar with the idea of sunk costs, Wikipedia states that they are costs that have already been incurred and which cannot be recovered to any significant degree. The Economics Web Institute has a good definition, too (search on that page). I was first introduced to this concept by an old boss who was studying for his MBA. “You have to be able to walk away from sunk costs,” he said. So many people consider walking away a waste of time, money, and effort, though. In order to not waste their …

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Go Badgers

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If there is a sport I like more than baseball, it’s college hockey. I was at the Frozen Four on Thursday, and it was a blast. Such good hockey from four excellent teams. The lineage of my tickets meant that I sat in the Maine section. Let me just say this: Maine spectators are as big of fans of their team as Wisconsin fans. There were just 500% more Wisconsin fans, being that the tournament is in Milwaukee. And I, as a Wisconsin fan, dressed in my red jersey, was adrift in a sea of light blue. The upshot is that I made it to the jumbotron a couple of times. If I were sitting in the Wisconsin student section …

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