System Administration

Apple, Xserves, and OS X Server

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Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Xserve will be available for order through January 31, 2011. Apple will honor and support all Xserve system warranties and extended support programs. Apple intends to offer the current shipping 160GB, 1TB, and 2TB Apple Drive Modules for Xserve through the end of 2011 or while supplies last. Apple will continue to support Xserve customers with service parts for warranty and out-of-warranty service. As of January 31, 2011 Apple will no longer have enterprise-class hardware for sale. This has sparked a massive discussion, because there are a number of pretty vocal people using Xserves to run Mac OS X Server, supporting Mac OS X clients, or as clusters running Xgrid. …

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Disk Performance of a 16-drive Dell PowerEdge R910

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You can order Dell PowerEdge R910s with as many as 16 disks attached to the H700 controller. We did. Since it’s hard to find benchmarks out there for what you can expect out of local storage performance I ran a few tests on it. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to run a comprehensive set of tests, as the box wasn’t mine and it needs to get deployed, but I was able to get some basic performance statistics. These tests were conducted with the integrated H700 controller, running firmware 12.3.0-0032 A02. That controller has 1 GB of NVRAM cache on it, and in each test case the container was set to the default stripe element size of 64 …

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Networking Tech Field Day

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Events, like people, have lifecycles. They are born, they grow up, they die. With Gestalt IT’s latest event, a networking-specific gathering in the heart of Silicon Valley, Stephen Foskett’s idea of a blogger-centric vendor tech gathering is becoming a teenager. It’s pretty much fully-grown, has its drivers license and a lot figured out, but it still has some awkward social moments, and even has to deal with obnoxious schoolyard bullies. I count myself incredibly fortunate that I’ve been invited to two of these events. The first was the Tech Field Day in Seattle, focused on storage. This one, the sixth Field Day, was on networking. I found myself surrounded by battle-hardened networking gurus, outnumbered 11 to 1. Daunting, sometimes, but …

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Heroes

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As kids, we grew up with heroes all around us. From fictional superheroes like Superman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman, to real life heroes like firefighters, we saw them saving lives, defeating evil, and telling us not to do drugs. As a Cub Scout my father, a firefighter, would take us all to the local firehouse and let us sit in the trucks, turn on the lights, honk the horn. He was a hero, to all us seven year olds. And it was an absolute mystery, a flat-out betrayal, when he said one day that he never wanted his sons to follow in his footsteps. Why can’t I be a hero, too? Heroes like firefighters are only heroic when things are going …

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Three Organizational Decisions That Help Me Virtualize

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Over the last ten years my organization has come a long way with its IT policies and processes. We’ve gone from the wild, wild west of IT where personal heroism ruled the day, to a place where there’s just enough process to make sure that communication happens correctly and things like our Configuration Management Database (CMDB) stay up to date. It’s been a lot of work, but I am actually really proud of where we’re at. There are three fundamental decisions we made a long time ago that, had they not been made, would have drastically changed how virtualization has proceeded here. 1. Clearly defined maintenance windows. Knowing exactly when someone can do maintenance on server has been crucial to …

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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

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The Wisconsin DMV sent me my gift a day early: And it was a present — I needed replacement plates but hadn’t ordered them yet. I’m glad I didn’t! I often joke that I haven’t come up with an original solution to anything in years, thanks to all the other sysadmins out there who share their solutions, knowledge, and time in order to make the world better. Thank you all for everything you do!

Rate-Limiting Steps

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In the last month I’ve added quite a few blogs to my reading list. One new one is “Movin’ Meat,” written by an ER doctor out of the Pacific Northwest. Besides just being interesting, some of his blog posts support my theory that IT folks can often learn things from people in other fields. The post from June 25, 2010, part four of his “Advice for Interns,” is one of these cases. When you read it (link is at the end because I want to get to my actual point before you leave to read it), I think substituting “customer/system” for “patient” in his list works nicely. My real point is this: one thing in his list really stood out …

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Why No-Reply Email Is A Bad Idea

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I absolutely hate no-reply email. I understand why it exists (autoresponders and bounces), but to send an email with no way to respond at all using the same communications medium is ridiculous. A good example of this is the customer satisfaction survey Red Hat just sent me. It is from a no-reply email address and there is no other email address listed. There is just some text and a URL, and clicking on the URL gets me: $ dig rhapps.redhat.com ns1.redhat.com […snip…] ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;rhapps.redhat.com.             IN      A A records are overrated. I generally am a nice guy and let vendors know something is messed up, but there are limits, especially when I’m already on the fence about a negative …

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More Equipment Means More To Go Wrong

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“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein Over the last couple years my organization has been building out an alternate site, for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes. I’ve noticed a disturbing trend, both among my own coworkers and others who are starting to think about DR & BC: that by having multiple data centers, multiple servers, or using multiple cloud vendors they’ll reduce the number of problems they’ll have. From a system administrator’s point of view that idea is absolutely false. Every piece of equipment you have can fail, and the more equipment you possess the more likely a failure will be. The more servers, switches, chillers, PDUs, and power grids you …

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Levels of Indirection

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“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection… Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.” – David Wheeler, though often attributed to Butler Lampson, who has some great quotes, too: “When in doubt, use brute force.” “In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.” Lots of good stuff if you read his “Hints for Computer System Design.”

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