System Administration

Don't Store Things You Care About In /tmp

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“Hey guys,” he says, stepping into our office. “I have a problem.” “What is it?” we reply. “Now that I’m back from vacation I find all the data for a project I was doing is missing.” “Restore it from backup.” “It doesn’t seem to have been backed up, either.” “Where was the data?” “/tmp.” “Ever heard of tmpwatch?” It’s now obvious why it’s missing and why it didn’t get backed up. “No…” Moral of the story: /tmp is for temporary stuff, not your big project’s data.

Underpromise, Overdeliver

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“What are you? Mr. Scott?” “Excuse me?” I reply. Did he just compare me to Scotty? “You scheduled your last few changes for way more time than you needed.” “Yeah, I guess so.” So what? I’m busy here. “Didn’t you ever watch Star Trek, where Scotty would tell Kirk that a fix would take a day and he’d do it in an hour?” “Yeah, underpromise and overdeliver…” “Wouldn’t it just be easier to get a 30 minute outage instead of always asking for two hours?” “Sure, but if things go wrong I’ll need that whole two hours to fix them again. If you want to compare me to Mr. Scott that’s fine, but the difference is that Mr. Scott was …

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Book Smart vs. Street Smart

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Book Smart: Knowing that separate development, test, and production environments should be as identical as possible. Street Smart: Realizing that depending on the purpose & goals of the development and test environments, “identical” may only refer to the OS, and you might only need physical hardware for production, if even that. Book Smart: A vendor says a software upgrade on a storage array will take two hours. Street Smart: The vendor is only talking about successful, optimal upgrades, and you schedule additional time for handling whatever goes wrong. Book Smart: Operating system patches don’t change functionality. Street Smart: The people that put OS updates together are human and make mistakes, like overwriting configuration files, messing permissions up, or omitting a …

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Ambiguity Is Your Enemy

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The sign above has a problem. You might need to have seen the gas station where I took the photo, but the error is that the emergency stop button isn’t in the middle of the store. It’s outside, mounted near the center of the front of the building. When you’re writing directions for others to follow you have to make them clear, concise, and unambiguous. It often helps to have others proofread them to make sure the outcome will be exactly what you want every time. If the outcome isn’t the same they need to be revised. This is especially important for emergency instructions. If the reader is going to have five seconds to read and comprehend your directions will …

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Windows Vista SP1, Not Bad

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I have to say that my initial experiences with Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 are pretty good. I’ve installed it on both my desktops, and now my laptop. That pokey feeling that Vista generally had seems to be gone, making things seem a lot smoother in general. This high praise from me, given my criticism of Vista in the past, as well as the trouble I’ve had with QuickTime, ATI drivers, scanner drivers, and strange network problems. I’m also impressed that the Vista SP1 kernel is the same as the Windows Server 2008 kernel. Fewer code bases usually means time saved in fixing bugs and adding features. I know Microsoft did a lot of work to improve the copy routines in …

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MS RDP Client: /console is now /admin

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Trying to use the Microsoft Remote Desktop Client (mstsc.exe) to connect to the console of a remote Windows machine? Coming from Microsoft Windows Vista SP1, or Windows Server 2008, or XP SP3? The old style of: host.name.com /console not working? It tells you “An unknown parameter was specified in computer name field?” Yeah, with RDP 6.1 they changed it to: host.name.com /admin Props to my colleague Steve Tanner for the tip. More information can be found at the Terminal Services Team Blog.

Stress

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Seth Godin has an interesting post today about stress. His perspective is as a marketer, but his point is universal: people are stressed out almost all the time. For us system administrators, do we ever just ask ourselves if something we’re doing, a system we’re building, even a tool we’re implementing for ourselves will create or reduce stress? Why not? I know some of the tools I use cause more stress than if I didn’t have them, to save very small amounts of time, gather almost useless information, or achieve some political goal. What if we could plot user stress versus time saved? Would we choose our tools, our applications, our systems differently?

"Unable To Store Job At Printer"

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Have an HP Color LaserJet 4650 and Microsoft Windows Vista? When you try printing more than one copy of a document do you get one copy plus a page with the errors below? Searched Google and found very little to help you with the problem? Error: Unable to store job at printer Reason: Insufficient disk space for this job   Solution: Delete some files from the disk before resending this job. Two solutions worked for me: 1. Switch from the PCL5 to PostScript driver. The PostScript driver’s defaults appear to be more compatible with the printer. 2. Edit the properties of the printer in Control Panel->Printers. What worked for me is setting Printer Memory to “128 MB,” Printer Hard Disk …

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Don't Repeat Yourself

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One of my favorite books as a system administrator is Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas’ “The Pragmatic Programmer.” It is a book built around 70 tips, ostensibly for programmers, but I find that most of them apply just as well to system administration. My favorite tip, by far, is “DRY – Don’t Repeat Yourself.” In an interview Dave Thomas explained DRY: “DRY says that every piece of system knowledge should have one authoritative, unambiguous representation. Every piece of knowledge in the development of something should have a single representation. A system’s knowledge is far broader than just its code. It refers to database schemas, test plans, the build system, even documentation.” Every day I fight repetition and duplication. Some days …

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Check Your Work

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No matter what line of work you’re in, no matter how big or small, or how much of an expert you are, it often pays to step back and check your work. It’s even better if you can get someone else to check your work, or do a sanity check on a plan you have. As the saying goes, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” A bad plan or a mistake is just a bug of a different sort, one that wastes lots of time and energy in the long run if it isn’t caught up front.

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