System Administration

…and by "l10O359" you mean "1lO0359"

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In interacting with a domain registrar this morning I received a message that looked approximately like: A few things come to mind: 1. This code is 27 characters long. The longer the code the more chance you have of someone improperly copying it, or not being able to read it over the phone. This applies both to the customer and to the support staff. This code has 62^27 combinations, which seems like overkill. An eight character code using only uppercase letters would be sufficient for 208 billion combinations (26^8), and is way more usable to us humans. 2. This code mixes uppercase and lowercase. Uppercase is often more readable, and support staff can always assume that when a customer says …

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Humor In Documentation

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Documentation is often dull and drab, optimized for getting information to those in need as efficiently as possible. Yet once in a while there’s something that makes dorks like myself chuckle. Like fun example data in the Atlassian Confluence documentation: The characters are from Fight Club, if you aren’t familiar with the movie. Nothing says you can’t entertain while you’re informing, even if it is just movie character names.

Servers Must Come Up Seamlessly

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How many servers do you have that, when rebooted, need to have their applications started by hand? I have 3, out of 250. And that’s just because the databases sometimes don’t come up, depending on how the machines went down. When I can restart a server and have everything happen correctly and automatically it saves a lot of my time. Especially if it’s an emergency situation, or 5 AM when I might not be thinking straight. If I’m responsible for an application I will always rig it to start on boot. If I’m not I’ll always urge the application admin to make their application startup procedure automatic. But hey, if they want to be called at 5 AM to run …

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Unfriendly URLs Are Bad

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I was reading Raj Dash’s post “41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks.” Reason number 30 sticks out to me: Unfriendly URLs. He’s talking about blogs, specifically, but this is a battle I fight every day with web applications. When we build new services and deploy new applications we have a choice. Do we make the users remember some awful URL, or do we use DNS and web redirects & aliases to simplify things? Here’s an example from my life. Someone in my organization thinks it’s okay to make people remember this URL in order to do their time reporting: https://barney.company.com:9001/OA_HTML/US/ICXINDEX.htm If I’m on a machine where I don’t have that URL bookmarked I won’t be able to find it. …

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Making the Look of Firefox OS-Specific is Bad

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Details of Firefox 3.0’s visual updates have emerged. I have mixed feelings about their plans to create OS-specific interfaces. As a techie I think what they are doing is cool. However, as a system administrator that supports multiple platforms (Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux) I have some concerns. Beyond being a good web browser, the big reason I like Firefox is that it is basically the same on every platform. Web applications can be tested once, and documentation can be written once (especially if it has screen shots). If the look changes I am going to have to maintain separate documentation for each, or rely on the user to translate the documentation (bad idea). If the feature set diverges …

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Patching != Vision

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Patching your systems isn’t the same as having vision. Knowing when your software needs an update is a symptom of reading the Secunia RSS feed. Sometimes upgrading software is a symptom of a vision, but even then usually not. It’s usually the result of a support issue, reactive instead of proactive. I asked Google to define ‘vision’ and m+w zander put it well: “An element of leadership that outlines where the organization should go and what it should become; focuses on strategic advantages, inspiration to deliver those advantages consistently, and clarity as a decision-making criterion.” Being hacker-free is good, but not a strategic advantage since everybody else is doing it, too.

College Courses & IT Skills

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Interesting article over at Server Specs about how certification doesn’t pay anymore. She asks a question at the end about computer science education, and its relevance to IT jobs. “Are today’s college courses relevant to the technologies actually used in today’s data center?” My response: yes and no. Yes, in that my CS education taught me the fundamentals of programming, program design, APIs, and operating systems. My solid understanding of operating system concepts has served me well. I understand how an OS makes scheduling decisions, allocates resources, and interacts with applications much better than many of my peers. I also understand programming language concepts very well, too, which helps a lot when dealing with my developer brethren. No, in that …

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close()

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“Hey,” I say, knocking on a programmer’s office door. “You have a second?” “What? I’m in the middle of something.” “Me, too. Another production outage, in fact. I’ve been helping some folks figure out why we’re having database connection problems. All their database connections are being used up. Turns out it’s the web application you rolled out last week. Did you get my email yesterday?” “Yeah.” “So did you have any thoughts on it?” “The DBAs just need to increase the number of database connections allowed.” “Well, that’s what they did to work around this. Does your web application really need 300 open connections to the database?” “It opens what it needs,” he says in a snotty tone of voice. …

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6 Tips for Technical Presentations

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Technical presentations are very Darwinian. Do a good one and you get invited to do another. Do one badly and you won’t get any more practice. I’ve survived a number of them now, likely because the audiences got such good sleep during the talk that they tell their friends. 🙂 Joking aside, I think these six things I do for each presentation have helped a lot. I share them with you. 1. Know your audience and talk at their level. Before I give a presentation I ask the folks who are coordinating the event about the people I’ll be talking to. Are they advanced users or newbies? Windows, Mac, or UNIX people? Application developers or system administrators? All these help …

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THIS is Infrastructure

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Our data center guys are putting in new power feeds. As part of this they need to step the incoming three-phase AC power down to 208 V, so they need a transformer. Four of them, actually. People rarely get a chance to see and appreciate these sorts of things, so I snapped a couple of photos. Note the different terminals on the windings (the yellow part). That determines the output voltage of the transformer. They build a one-size-fits-all transformer and make the connection based on your needs. Now if these transformers would change into big alien robotic helpers in the data center we’d be in business. 🙂

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