System Administration

“Hello?” “Hi, this is boss-of-developer. Sorry, I got your number from one of the other managers. Where are you?” “I’m about to be in my office.” “Stay there.” An extraordinarily short amount of time passes. “Hey, what’s up with you and my staff?” “Um, they’re kinda off the reservation and I want to help them but they think they need stuff like 100% uptime, huge machines, etc. and they totally don’t. I believe in the cause, I just want to add some of my own wisdom so that things are better for everybody down the road. And if they need big hardware we can always scale up, and do so very easily. I think they missed my point.” “Yeah… they …

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So I spent the morning conversing with my favorite developer, via email. It went something like this: “We need PHP 5.1.2, Apache 2.2.0, Java 1.4.1, and MySQL 5.0. We also require a four CPU machine and 8 GB of RAM.” “I counter with PHP 4.3.9, Apache 2.0.52, Java 1.4.2 or Java 1.5.0, and MySQL 4.1.12, and a virtual machine until we can tell what exactly you need.” “You are being obstructionist. Please give us what we ask for.” “Actually, I don’t think my services will fit your needs. You might explore some other options. Go talk to our Windows techs.” “We need this to run on Linux. Please help me. The Windows guys sent us to you originally.” (ooh, they’re …

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Done right, a standard is helpful. You can rely on it, make assumptions using it, and get things done faster. Done wrong and it’ll be the square peg that has to fit into the round hole. The idea of a standard is that you minimize the variations you’ll encounter. You might have to embrace certain variations, though, in order for your standard to be useful, and therefore popular. Take the spork. You know, a spoon with mini fork-like tines at the end, popular at Taco Bell. It is a miserable fork, and a crappy spoon, because it tries too hard to be more efficient. Take the bathroom. You could have one standard, the toilet, for both men and women. Or …

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Ah, the developer from yesterday was back today. It started with a harmless IM message: “Are you busy? Could you come over to my office to talk to my manager and I?” Today’s gonna suck, might as well make it bad right away. “Well, we’ve decided we can make this application cluster-able. We’ll use an Oracle database hosted by the DBA group instead of a local MySQL database.” “Oh, I didn’t know you needed a database. Okay, Oracle is fine — we preload the clients on our Linux hosts anyhow. Are they going to cluster the database for you?” “Cluster the database?” “Yeah. Make it highly-available. You told me that this application needed zero downtime. Databases need patching, too. In …

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I was talking this morning with a developer about hosting their application. This application was developed on a desktop Linux box, and the developer’s boss liked it, and now they want it to run in production. I’m cool with that. Some of the best ideas we have came out of people poking around on their own. When I’m approached about hosting an application, one of the questions I always ask is “Tell me who the audience is for this?” The developer responded with “Oh, it could be the whole world.” “The whole world?” “Yeah. We need to make sure that this is running on hardware that can handle the load. This is going to get really popular.” Yeah. Um… yeah. …

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I just got a new PC. It’s a Dell Dimension 9150, dual core CPU, 2 GB of RAM, dual mirrored SATA-II disks. Awesome. But practically the biggest improvement over my old machine is a pair of 19″ 1905FP flat-panel LCD monitors. My old pair of 19″ CRTs took up so much of my desk space that the switch has given me square feet of my desk back. Nice. One thing about LCDs, though — the nature of the pixels in the LCDs makes some of my fonts look crappy. Microsoft’s ClearType makes them smooth, but it’s a false smooth, and they just look fuzzy then. Luckily, I just found the ClearType tuning tool, so I can change it so I …

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When you use software or hardware that you didn’t invent yourself you have to budget time to keep up with that vendor. If you are an IT manager you need to make sure that you have budgeted time and money for your staff to keep up, and that they are keeping up. From time to time vendors change their documentation, especially best practices documents. They don’t tell you when things change and unless you are looking for the changes you won’t see them. I’ve been caught by this a number of times. Recently I helped with an effort to resolve some storage problems we were having, and in the process discovered some discrepancies between our procedures and what the vendor …

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