System Administration

Treading Water

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It’s Saturday, and one of my servers is having a conniption fit. The load is like a sine wave between 6 and 12, and it’s trying to do a lot of I/O. This machine is set up as a mail server, optimized for latency and not throughput. It was a mail server, actually, until it turned into a Sophos PureMessage reporting and management machine for the other seven spam and virus filtering machines. The stats from the other machines are stored in a PostgreSQL database, which is pre-installed with newer versions of PureMessage. I’m not quite sure what Sophos is doing under the hood, but this machine suddenly needs to do a lot more I/O, and going from mail server …

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When to Cluster, When to Build Big

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When you’re building a medium-large sized service there’s a fundamental choice you have to make: do you build it on one big machine or do you cluster smaller machines? If you choose a cluster do you make it fewer, bigger machines or a bunch of smaller machines? A cluster is hard. A cluster usually means a shared filesystem. A shared filesystem means a SAN. A shared filesystem usually means an IP-based lock server, which means your network needs to be as reliable as your SAN. It also means that file accesses will be slower. Sometimes a cluster means weirdo stuff like multicast, or things your network guys might not like or understand. You also might need to do heartbeat via …

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Professional Obstacles

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One of the ways I sort people is using the obstruction test. Do they obstruct my efforts, or do they assist me? From now on I’m giving people +2 points if they help me, -1 point if they block me, and +1 point if they just stay out of my way but don’t help me. Nobody remains neutral as there are only two choices: right and wrong. “What exactly do you need that for?” — war cry of obstructionism, -1. “Oh, you’re doing such-and-such. Have you tried blah-blah-blah?” — could go either way, generally helpful, +2 “I need to get this in writing from your boss” — I just asked you to add me to a vendor’s support website so …

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Sometimes I Hate Mornings

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Phone ringing… phone ringing… eyes peel open… I fumble through yesterday’s jeans for my cell phone. “Uhhh, hello” “Morning, sunshine. Are we going to do this?” “Do what? Oh, crap, what time is it?” “9:30. Sunday. List server upgrade.” I’m instantly wide awake. “What the hell, my alarm didn’t go off.” “Should I just do this myself?” “Nah, I’m awake now, I’ll help. Freaking alarm.” “It was probably user error.” “Probably. Give me sixty seconds and I’ll be online.” I roll over and grab my laptop. There’s nothing like doing work while you’re still in bed. But then again, there’s nothing like sleeping while you’re in bed, either.

Use More Words

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“Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make more clear.” – Joseph Joubert I’ve been evaluating Nagios over the past couple of days to see if it can replace our aging Big Brother installation. I have about 130 hosts I’d like to monitor, and the other teams have another 200 hosts or so that will probably join me if things work out. During this exercise I’ve realized a bad habit system administrators have: using abbreviations instead of descriptive text. This is the same bad habit that programmers strive to avoid with variable names. When you’re defining service tests in Nagios you have to give them a name. The first round of names I gave to the services were …

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Be Human

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Over the last couple of days I’ve been bastardizing Guy Kawasaki’s list of ways to brand products and applying it to system administrators (sorry Guy!). Sysadmins have ample opportunities to treat themselves and their work as a product being sold to their end users, but they rarely do. If there was another IT group in the building would yours still get the business? Are all of your users happy with the product you provide to them? Do you communicate as a human being and not as a robot when you talk to non-IT people about IT topics? Guy Kawasaki’s points six and seven hit hard. “Focus on PR, not advertising,” and “strive for humanness.” There are two key points he …

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Speak English and STFU

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Yesterday I wrote about Guy Kawasaki’s list of steps to brand your products and yourself. Some of those ideas are directly applicable to a system administrator. Like speaking English. There are two unforgivable curses that will damn any techie that uses them: speaking in tongues, and always getting the last word in. Tongues? Yes, tongues. Marketing Droid: Why didn’t the new web site go up last night? Sysadmin: Well, the problem was that the DNS zone file didn’t get a new serial number, so the changes we made last night to the A records didn’t propagate out to the slave name servers. By now the marketing droid is twitching and going insane, and there is a 100% chance that they’re …

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System Administration By Walking Around

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Hot damn, Guy Kawasaki has a blog. If you aren’t familiar with him, good. That’s one more reason why your kind will never rule the Earth. I was reading his post on the art of branding and it got me thinking that system administration teams never act like they have a product they’re selling. Time after time I’ve listened to non-sysadmin friends and relatives bitch about their local IT guys, how system X sucks, how the IT guy messed up all their stuff, etc. Why? Why don’t sysadmins act like they have a product they’re trying to sell? Sure, it’s not a product in the traditional consumer sense, but the people in your organization are the people that pay your …

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Naming Schemes

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The best compliment for a web site is the knowledge that I was thinking about building one just like it. In this case, a wiki full of computer naming schemes. Hell yeah.

OpenOffice, Round One

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I’m at T+3 days now with OpenOffice. Apparently 2.0.1 “has issues” including the lack of help files for Calc. Once I found the forum post on how to fix that we’re in business. You know, I’m not a big-time software developer but if I made a release that had some stupid errors that were easily correctable I’d fix ’em and quickly release a version 2.0.2 or something. That’s just me, though. You’ll only annoy a few thousand potential users between the December release and March, when the fix is scheduled. The lack of active tooltips is annoying. I liked when MS Office would pop up a little function reference as I was trying to use the function. I have enough …

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