Author: Bob Martens

Categories
Review Technology

Review: Time Management for System Administrators

time management book image

Continuing along my IT operations book kick, I recently picked up Time Management for System Administrators by Tom Limoncelli on SysAdmin Appreciation Day 2014. Considering I continue to struggle with managing my own time at work every day while not dropping numerous proverbial balls, I thought it would be a good book to dive into.

After reading the book over the past week I have come to two conclusions about every time management book:

  1. Every modern way of managing your time comes back to David Allen’s Getting Things Done. When you peel everything away, this seems to be the rock upon which all modern ways of managing time is built.
  2. The best books about managing time take the general ideas from Getting Things Done (GTD) and then narrows it down to what matters for that segment of the population (e.g. system administrators) and adds some additional items that are not included within the larger, generalized GTD way of doing things.

With those two things in mind, I cannot help but recommend this book to any person who works even slightly within IT operations on any level. Not only does it take GTD and focus on how the general principles can help system administrators (even if Tom does not lay out the book that way), it adds all of the things that a system administrator needs to think about in order to free up time to get actual work done.

Instead of rehashing the book, I’m going to lay out some changes I am going to make in order to take some of the lessons from the book and apply them to myself.

  • I’m taking the time to really keep track of my tasks, even if it will take some time to break the habit. If something is worth doing, it is worth tossing into OmniFocus and then taking care to make sure I apply a due date to it so that I have it in front of me. The Forecast view within OmniFocus is where I spend most of my time since it combines the tasks I need to do with the calendar events I have for the day. I’ll adjust things in the future (and I will blog about what I am now doing), but just moving back into a more robust task management application is a big step in some sort of direction.
  • Usually infrastructure projects which eliminate work for myself and others takes a backseat to other work that needs to be done, but that is going to change. Being able to get automated systems setup for password management and account creation will free up our current staff to better use their time on things which benefit the entire campus. I will also be looking into a payment gateway to allow students to purchase print credit on their own, but there are other issues (like refunds) attached to that plan.
  • I am planning on spending some time digging into Ruby or Python as an automation language, and not as a web development language as I had in the past (Ruby on Rails).
  • I will have weekly meetings regularly and scheduled for regular times so that I don’t have to think about when they are going to happen or worry about setting up a mutually beneficial time for all of the parties involved. Either they can make it, or they can’t and we wait until the next week.

There will probably be more, and I’ll outline some in greater detail in the future (hopefully), but they also all seem relatively common sense. I believe that is the reason they will make the largest difference.

The important part right now is to make some changes and stick with them. Progress is the name of the game, not perfection.

So, head out and grab the book and read it for yourself. I have a paper copy on order already so that I have it at my desk whenever I need a little extra help.

Categories
Business Technology

Integrating iPrint and PaperCut

As we began our summer projects, it became clear that we were going to move ahead with Windows 8.1 in the student labs for the coming school year. This was going to bring about a whole host of changes we needed to make to the supporting servers and systems at Martin Luther College, but the one I have been working on the most has been our print and print accounting.

Moving away from our aging iPrint and Pcounter infrastructure was going to take some thinking on my part, but I didn’t have a clear path forward in the beginning. So I’m writing this blog post in the hopes that it can help someone else in the future who is working with the new Novell iPrint, Novell NetWare 6.5, and PaperCut for print accounting.

Here is an overview of how the system is setup now:

  • All printers are created on the new iPrint 1.1 appliance. The drivers are then loaded for each platform and then associated with the printer.
  • For those printers that need it, I create individual profiles so that we do not need to monkey around with settings for each individual printer. Granted, this affects a very small number of overall printers.
  • When a print job is submitted through iPrint, the accounting is handled entirely by PaperCut through their iPrint integration. This is the part I need to setup again in the future when we upgrade the appliance.
  • PaperCut handles making sure the proper account is debited by reading the username from the Novell Client login information sent through iPrint. It might sound complicated, but it works.
  • Users can check their current account amounts through the user portal built into PaperCut. The administrative backend is also where we handled refunds and adding money to accounts.

This setup affords us some benefits I was not aware of at first.

  • We no longer have to worry about popups for print jobs and amounts. We have email notifications setup to be sent off when accounts get low and people are pushed to the user portal for questions about how much print credit they have left.
  • The iPrint appliance is currently not syncing with our primary eDirectory infrastructure. This has afforded us some time to move ahead with our migration to OES 11.2 at a slower pace instead of trying to push through the migration this summer (big win in my opinion). All user account syncing is handled by PaperCut.
  • We’ve eliminated the old Pcounter application, so our help desk can eliminate a Windows XP VM we were using specifically for that application.
  • Moving to the appliance allows us to easily move to newer versions in the future so we can keep in front of the technology curve. Until this summer we did not have the ability to move to Windows 8.1.
  • Student printing from the residential network is being considered once again since the account and printing infrastructure is up-to-date and should allow us the flexibility needed to only open up iPrint for printing to institution-owned printers.

However, here are a list of things to watch out for:

  • Make sure you open up port 9191 on your iPrint appliance by logging in as root through SSH and using YaST.
  • Speaking of YaST, always check the Advanced options of an area. I spun my wheels for hours as I was troubleshooting the creating of printers between iPrint and PaperCut, only to find that my firewall settings were bad. I should have known, but I didn’t.
  • Think through your directory structure. You will gain the most flexibility by using groups to differentiate user types, not their location within the directory tree. I am now planning our migration to do just that so we can move all of our printing through iPrint and PaperCut so that we are able to have better reporting.
  • We are not using the mobile printing capabilities of iPrint at all right now, but we will probably need to consider it in the future. When the time comes, I will need to be on OES 11.2 to get away from some LDAP attributes missing from our eDirectory 8.7 installations on NetWare.

Overall, in the short time I have worked with it, I have been very happy with how iPrint and PaperCut are working for MLC. If you want more specifics about our installation and what we are doing (I’m really working hard to keep things as simple as possible), please let me know.

Categories
Technology

Pulling Apart

I’ve had these two books floating around my house for the better part of six months now. I’m not exactly proud of it, but it is a fact of life. I have always had an issue of focusing on a single project at a time and putting other things away.

So here the books sit, two different from my own head made into concrete (and somewhat heavy) objects. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but sometimes I will sit and stare at the two books for minutes at a time and not open either, afraid to make a poor decision about my future and “waste” time on something I should not.

That’s how I’m feeling right now, pulled apart in a sense. The IT Ops person in me really wants to dig into systems programming and automation while the iOS and Apple user in me wants to dig into iOS development and Swift. Is there a decision that I really need to make here or can I have it big ways?

The pull, however, is still there. In a day and age where it feels like we are told to specialize more and more, the idea of instead working to be as much of a development “generalist” as possible seems to be passé.

However, I still feel that mobile is the future and that mobile has two different sides. There is the big iron of large servers on the backend and the mobile front ends which are lighter and allow people to use all if that power to get things done. It is an interesting dance between large and small, nimble and lumbering … kind of cool.

Maybe there is a way to do both?

Categories
Business Review Technology

Review: The Phoenix Project

Back when Mrs. Sallie Draper joined our team at Martin Luther College’s Network Services, she recommended a book for our group to read. Being the person that I am, I filed it away to read in the future and bought it for my Kindle and then promptly forgot about it for far too long.

That book is The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford.

I regret that I did not pick it up sooner because as soon as I began reading its tale, I was engrossed and finished it in a single day. I don’t often do that anymore with three kids, but I found the time to do it this time.

it is billed as “A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win”, and that is a good synopsis for the entirety of the book. It is fiction about how a company falls to the bottom and then bands together to work to the top.

I’m going to try to stay away from any spoilers because I do recommend that you read this book if you work within the IT departments of any company or organization even if the story isn’t totally applicable to your size or sector.

The story is split into two halves, even if the split isn’t where you would expect it to be right away. It follows the old saying of “things will get bad before they get better”. It really does for this story but the whole it worth it to get the mind thinking about what the future might bring.

Those reading the book closely will find the agenda the authors have quite early, and you need to be aware that while they are not selling anything in the specific sense … they ARE selling an ideal for how IT should operate within the business and I tend to agree! That, of course, makes it easy to recommend the book.

It is an easy read and, I feel, time well spent.

Highly recommended.

Categories
Technology

Best Setup?

What would my ideal setup look like at the moment?

I have no idea.

I like having a desktop because I worry less about things breaking and can just set things up and forget about it. I have a keyboard, mouse, and speakers ready to go whenever I might need them without having to fuss around with either cables or a docking station.

On the other hand, I like being able to take everything that I am working on with me wherever I am going. Even those things I don’t want to toss into a cloud storage provider’s folder … which can be a few things. I also can set up my development environment and not worry about syncing any changes around. I’m lazy, setting things up take time and settings things up to sync takes time too.

I’ll admit that I also like to have one machine follow me around because I can get attached to technology quite easily. Is that a good thing? Probably not, but it does affect the decisions I make on what to purchase.

Using my Lenovo ThinkPad X220 with a docking station, even just a little bit, has opened my eyes to what is possible when you can have a simple plug-and-work situation with a portable computer. A docking station makes getting started super simple and allows me to not even worry about hooking up additional items. I just set the ThinkPad in the dock and begin working once openSUSE has worked out the settings. It is extremely slick.

While I do not expect Apple to adopt a docking station port like the ThinkPad has, Thunderbolt provides some of the benefits with a single cable to either a Thunderbolt Display or a Thunderbolt dock. Eliminating the need to connect a USB cable, Ethernet cable, Thunderbolt cable, and audio cable and instead just hooking up power and a Thunderbolt cable is a definite win.

I like openSUSE a lot (I think I can safely say that it is currently my favorite distro), but my heart still belongs to OS X, even if my head tries to convince me otherwise. It is cemented even more by the fact that Apple still makes the best overall computers for me. I’m the most comfortable with them, and the mental loops I can work myself into trying to decide on new hardware + software is not worth switching to anything else full-time.

The decision is made easier by the dearth of excellent native software available for desktop Linux. Server Linux is left out here because Linux is the king of the server (as far as I am concerned). OS X has a ton of high-quality native software and many of them with companion apps on iOS. It makes the experience of moving between mobile and desktop a lot easier. With what was announced at WWDC, I think we are going to see even more moving in that direction.

When the rubber hits the road, this is what my mind has settled on for the moment:

  • An 11″ MacBook Air or (PLEASE APPLE PLEASE) 12″ MacBook Air, not even maxed out or anything, but adequate to handle the computing needs of me from day-to-day. With Apple moving all of my photos to iCloud in Fall 2014 and iTunes Match already keeping my music safe for me, it will mean I have a lesser need for large amounts of storage with me at all times.
  • A Thunderbolt dock of some sort both at home and at work. It will also entail a power adapter so that I would hook up the two cables and then get to work. It would allow me to keep my mouse and keyboard, Ethernet cable, external hard drives, and sound hooked up without needing to worry about hooking up an individual cable for each thing.
  • A single 27″ monitor in each location. I’d give up my multi-screen layout for a single large monitor. ASUS has some models I might look at to accomplish this.

I have no idea what my iOS load out is going to look like after the Fall since the inclusion of larger-screen iPhones might make me rethink the iPad’s role for me. This change to a MacBook Air would also move the current Mac mini to a server role since I am looking forward to sinking my teeth into OS X Server 4.

Of course, this will all change tomorrow so feel free to ignore it.