System Administration

Use Descriptive Labels in VirtualCenter

by

(Update on January 25, 2011 – I’ve actually decided that using the subnet information in my setup is confusing, as we’ve grown to have VLANs with the same subnets on them, and VLANs with multiple subnets on them. I talk about this a little in my post “Labels Should Only List Properties of That Particular Object.” I don’t believe in revisionist blog history, and I admit that my techniques grow over time as I learn and my environment gets more complex, so I won’t delete/revise this post. Just keep it in mind.) ————- “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names” – Chinese Proverb Suggestion: Use descriptive labels wherever possible in your VMware VirtualCenter setup. You …

Read More

Fastest Bug Resolution Ever

by

17:12 CDT: I file a bug with Zimbra about version 4.5.5 detecting RHEL 4 Update 5 as RHEL 5. 18:17 CDT: Resolved, bug closed. That’s the fastest I’ve ever had a vendor respond to a bug report, much less fix the problem (which includes a documentation update). Go Zimbra!

Use Group Permissions

by

Use group permissions wherever possible. Why? 1. Managing individuals is a lot easier when all you have to do is make them a group member. When people change roles you just plop them in a different group. 2. In three years you aren’t going to remember what specific privilege gives a person the right to do something, and it will cost you at least two hours of messing around. 3. The group name can be descriptive so you can tell exactly what it is for, not just that Susie Q. Person has a particular privilege. And if you start using a group for more than one thing, update the description so it’s obvious.

How A Sysadmin Got His Email Under Control

by

All of this discussion about declaring email bankruptcy got me thinking about what I did last year to deal with my email. I was sorting through 400 new messages a day, and it was overwhelming. I would delete most of the messages without reading them, because they were: – Mailing list traffic that I never read. Even when I filtered the mail to another folder some would leak through because lots of n00bs just cannot resist bcc’ing the list. – Automated messages from systems, bereft of actual content. As a system administrator I get all sorts of useless messages from devices and systems. – Spam. Lots of spam was leaking through my filters. So beginning in November, I started a …

Read More

Try It First, Then Do It Again

by

Every project to implement a specific application or technology should be at least two phases: 1. Get it working for the first time. Check it out and learn about it, with the intention of throwing this copy away. 2. Get it working in production. Do it for real. You cannot plan out how you are going to support something in production until you know something about the application. You won’t know anything about the application until you’ve tried using it once. Therefore the first steps of a project should be to check it out first. Then do it again for real later. This goes for small applications and projects, too. Sure, you might be tempted to just start using that …

Read More

Scripting Repeatable Tasks

by

My new rule: if you intend to do something the same way on more than three machines, ever, or if the time spent on doing this same thing exceeds ten minutes in your lifetime, or the lifetimes of the folks around you, then it needs to be scripted. Why? Humans cannot do the same thing the same way for very long. Period. They forget things and get distracted. They take bathroom breaks and forget where they were. They can’t remember how they did the exact same thing last week, but they think they do. They think they remember the written directions by heart. They don’t. There are lots of things humans are good at. Doing the same thing the same …

Read More

Complexifying

by

“Sometimes I wonder about the complexifying instinct,” says Brent Simmons over at inessential.com. Yeah, sometimes I wonder about that myself. Two of my coworkers just dreamt up this complex user management scheme, complete with scripts and whatnot. Things automatically add people to other things, another script removes people, and my prediction is that sometime down the road one of the scripts will go nuts and delete everybody. “What’s wrong with the current system?” I asked. “What current system? We don’t have one.” “Sure we do. We have a tool to run ad-hoc commands on all the boxes. When someone leaves you tell us and we do a userdel on that username. When someone new shows up you tell us and …

Read More

For Best Results Add Virtualization Slowly

by

Alex over at Virtual Infrastructure 411 linked to an interesting study done by CA which indicates that 44% of server virtualization deployments were failures. This is interesting to me, and timely, too. Today I spoke to another organization with a failing virtualization project, the third so far. The first group that I spoke with was just overwhelmed. They’d gone in head-first, buying blades, storage, everything. They had no experience with any of the gear and were drowning in it, while their managers were just seeing expenses but no savings and freaking out about it. The three IT guys were already way too busy and could not make time to figure any of the new gear out, much less become experts …

Read More

Watching IT All Fall Apart

by

“It’s like leaving a book in a pail of water for five years, then trying to get it out in one piece.” – my friend Kevin Kettner, speaking with me about how some organizations ignore their IT infrastructure so completely that when they finally need to do something with it they find they have to redo it all. Also see “tip of the iceberg” and “yak shaving.”

I Solemnly Swear I Am Up To No Good

by

My coworkers and I have a category of equipment, creation, or hack called “I solemnly swear I am up to no good.” Thanks goes out to Messrs. Mooney, Wormtail, Padfoot, and Prongs. Permanent entries so far in this category include the power draw-measuring extension cord with all the wires separated, and the extension cord I have with two male three-pronged plugs. Totally necessary, once. Temporary entries have been such things as a 100 foot Ethernet cable across the data center floor, or the server pulled forward on its rails, running, case open, with drives sitting wedged in the top, along with a power supply for them, extension cord across the floor to an outlet. Sometimes the fastest way out of …

Read More

+ More Posts +