System Administration

Cargo Cult System Administration

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The term “cargo cult” comes from World War II, where the USA and Japan created small airstrips and bases on islands in the Pacific Ocean, and the locals mistook the cause & effect in relation to why goods and cargo appeared on the island. It’s absolutely fascinating, and the Wikipedia entry for cargo cults indicates some of these cults are still operating. The excellent book Code Complete, by Steve McConnell, introduced me to the idea of cargo cult software engineering. Turns out, a guy by the name of Eric Lippert coined the phrase “cargo cult programming,” and explains the whole thing well: During the Second World War, the Americans set up airstrips on various tiny islands in the Pacific.  After …

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Who Cares About Time Zones Anyway?

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If you think you have a thankless job you should think about Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert. Heck, it’s not even a paying job for them. They’re volunteers. Perhaps even masochists. What do they do? They maintain the time zone database (“zoneinfo”) for all of the computing world. And while residents of a particular country have to put up with just the general stupidity of their own politicians, these guys have to put up with all the stupidity of all politicians, across the Earth. Every time a politician in Russia, or Cameroon, or Indiana thinks it’d be a good idea to screw with the clocks these guys update and redistribute their database[0]. Vendors pick up the update and send …

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Yak Shaving

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One of my favorite terms for my day-to-day work life is “yak shaving,” and I’m saddened that so many people have not heard of it when I say it. “What are you doing today?” I’m asked. “Shaving yaks,” I reply. Coined at MIT as part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), it’s described well in Jeremy Brown’s archived email: You see, yak shaving is what you are doing when you’re doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you’re supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you’re doing to the original meta-task. Similarly, the Jargon File has it as: Any seemingly pointless activity which …

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Why I Don't Use Third-Party Binary Packages

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There are a number of third-party package repositories out there for Linux distributions. For example, Fedora runs the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository, which contains builds of open source software that isn’t supplied with Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Similarly, a lot of projects have their own repositories that supply builds of software for OpenSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. Maybe it’s just because I’m old-school, and maybe it’s because I enjoy compiling things, but I really don’t like the idea of using binaries found on the Internet. I never have. As an aside, I really tried hard to make the rest of this post not be critical, or seem like criticism, but instead just be a reflection of …

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Strange Characters in My WordPress Blog

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In late August I moved my blog from a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. With it came an upgrade to MySQL, from 4 to 5. The migration itself seemed pretty painless, as I was able to recompile Apache on the new host and just copy everything over intact. I moved the databases by dumping each one and importing them on the other side. A week ago I was doing some work on the blog and noticed that for every apostrophe there were three other characters now: ’. I use a lot of apostrophes, and it sort of sucks to have every “it’s” become “it’s”. More specifically, it was only …

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How to Fix Google Chrome Font Rendering Issues

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I’ve been having a heck of a time with terrible font rendering in Chrome. In fact, it’s been my biggest complaint about that browser. I get fonts with missing pieces, fonts that don’t render completely, text that is completely absent, and text with severely pixelated edges. I don’t mean to be a snob about it, but I look at this thing many hours every day, and I’d like it to work right. Here’s a severe example. The image on the left is what I saw in Chrome, and the image on the right is what I should have seen when visiting a particular web site:         That’s like WTF levels of crappy, right? It was happening all the time, on …

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Fallacies of Distributed Computing

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I was cleaning out a stack of old papers and ran across a copy of “The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing” that I’d made back in 2004. As Wikipedia puts it, a guy by the name of Peter Deutsch “asserted that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make a set of assumptions… and these assumptions ultimately prove false, resulting either in the failure of the system, a substantial reduction in system scope, or in large unplanned expenses required to redesign the system to meet its original goals.” 1. The network is reliable. 2. Latency is zero. 3. Bandwidth is infinite. 4. The network is secure. 5. Topology doesn’t change. 6. There is one administrator. 7. Transport cost is zero. 8. …

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How to Change SCSI Controllers on your Linux VM

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A question from Matt Vogt prompted this, where he wants to go from the BusLogic  SCSI controller to the LSI Logic SAS controller. It’s actually a straightforward conversion if you have the right steps. This is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4, and 5, but the principle should be the same for everything. It’s basically: snapshot, change config files, change hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, in contrast, appears to have all the LSI Logic, parallel & SAS, drivers, as well as the paravirtual SCSI drivers, so all you need to do is shut the VM down and change the type of SCSI controller you’re using. I always recommend trying this on a test VM before you try …

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System Administrator Appreciation Day is One Week Away

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I have to thank the SolarWinds crew for reminding me that we, as system administrators, have a holiday coming up. And in particular, bosses, managers, and other herders of nerds should be aware that July 29th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Yes, sysadmins. You know, those folks that tirelessly respond to pages at midnight. Those folks that come running when your CEO’s laptop has a virus on it. Those folks that virtualized all your servers and saved you lots of money. The folks that run your servers, and networks, and keep things in your data center calm and cool have a thankless job 364.25 days out of the year. Next Friday is a good excuse to thank them. Every sysadmin …

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The Manhattan Way

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“We prefer plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America. If you go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi somewhere, you become a part of the taxi driver’s life; he refuses to take your money because it would demean your friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps hot tears when you get in some other guy’s taxi. You end up meeting his kids at some point and have to devote all sorts of ingenuity to finding some way to compensate him without insulting his honor. It is exhausing. Sometimes you just want a simple Manhattan-style taxi ride. But in order to have an American-style setup, where you can just go out and hail a taxi and be on your …

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