Author: Bob Martens

Categories
Business Technology

BrainShare: The Next Generation

I just stole the title from this article over on Novell’s Cool Solutions titled, obviously, BrainShare: The Next Generation … which you should go and read.

While it speaks generally about BrainShare and Novell, the overall message is a useful one for any information technology company of department:

How do you spread the word about technology choices to the next generation of IT professionals?

That’s my quote up above, feel free to steal it. It has probably been said 1000 times in the past, so I don’t claim any real ownership of it.

However, the question still stands. Many decisions are bore out due to context that is long gone, or long perverted in our minds, and so new decisions are often made without the benefit of understanding why the old decisions were made in the first place! What a waste of time, effort, and resources!

One of my favorite things to do is to listen to the stories about why certain technology decisions were made. Who was there. What were the options. What was tried in the past. Ultimately, why the decision to go with one technology in one way over others. They all provide valuable insight into not just the technology, but into the organization as a whole. You learn about internal politics, decision-making structures outside of the organizational tree, and tons of other important cultural information.

I mean culture as in what is there, not what some people in the organization are trying to push.

For me, BrainShare 2014 is going to be another part of that. Novell has been the backbone of our IT infrastructure since 1995, and it looks like it is going to stay a major part going forward. In order to adequately serve the campus, I’ll need to also get to know Novell better and Novell, me.

Going to conferences, talking with other users, trying out the new (AND THE OLD) technology is all part of the same goal of retaining knowledge from the past while also looking to the future so that we can make better decisions with more information to provide the best services we possibly can.

So I look forward to attending BrainShare 2014 and many conferences to come in the future as I navigate providing the best systems and services I can for today and the future.

Categories
Technology

When Disaster Strikes

It isn’t a matter of if, but when.

Something is going to go wrong and you are going to be left holding a bucket to a quickly sinking ship. In that time of crisis, it would have been nice to have some sort of disaster recovery plan laid out so that you don’t have to think as much when your tech is on the line.

That is what I am working on right now.

Here is what I have mapped out as our initial run at this:

  • Everything will be stored on our college’s Google Drive account. We have a folder shared among all of the employees in our department and we can share the Disaster Recovery folder will additional people if there is a need.
  • The main document will be a spreadsheet outlining the names of the servers, what area the server is located, what rack they are on, IP addresses, administrative user names (passwords will not be housed in here for obvious reasons), operating system version, what services are currently running on those machines, a link to another document with more information for that machine, what order the servers should be brought back, and then a comment field for any additional funny business.
  • Additional documents will be created for each server. This document will outline any additional information needed for installation of the operating systems, settings, software installation, and other stuff that might be important to know.
  • A document outlining the network topology for the campus.
  • List of emergency contacts for various systems and also contacts for various important vendors (like Comcast, our telecom, etc.).

The idea is to have a document with a strong overview of the entire server infrastructure and then further information if that is needed for anything. The harder part will be keeping these documents updated for the future.

We will handle the passwords some other way (yet to be determined) and then make sure that the people who need to know about this know about it.

Even if some disaster doesn’t strike us in the near term, it will still be good to just take a look at how things are setup currently and see if there are any areas where we can improve our tolerances without upsetting too many people.

It is never a bad thing to be vigilant.

Categories
Technology

Desktop Experiment

I’ve been running with a desktop as my main computer for almost five months now and I am ready to give some thoughts on how it is going. This is going to be a list post again, so bear with me:

  • Having a stationary desktop is really nice in three areas: instant access, stability, multi-monitors. Being able to sit down at my desk at work, have both monitors sitting there, and not moving the machine around so that I don’t break anything is really nice. I can get to work a little bit quicker and be able to see a lot of information when I need it (like troubleshooting our storage servers).
  • Oops, there is one more area: storage and expansion. Even with just the Mac mini, I have two external hard drives hooked up and 750 GB of internal storage. Total I have almost 3 TB of storage available whenever I need it. That’s nice.
  • Not having access to everything wherever I am in a pain many times. My wife’s MacBook Pro  is nice and I have a user account setup for the basic things I need to do from home, but I don’t have all of my pictures on here and the customizations to my development environment need to be synchronized in some other way. I’m fairly certain Apple is not going to bother syncing my .profile anytime soon. Getting the itch to work with Swift has keenly hit me because I have two different environments at work and home.
  • As a sysadmin and (hopeful) developer, I still have a need for a laptop … so then I’m working with two different environments at the moment and I’m definitely more comfortable and familiar with OS X than I am with any desktop Linux distributions.

I’m definitely leaning toward picking up a new Apple laptop when it becomes doable and then moving the Mac mini that I have to a server role. OS X Server 4 looks to be an excellent release and I am looking forward to playing with it and seeing if I can fit it into my technology life in some way.

Being able to consolidate down to a single machine running OS X will happen, but I do not know when. With rumors about a 12″ MacBook Air swirling around, and (thanks @curtismchale) Henge Docks working on some amazing products for pseudo-docks, it looks to be doable for me soon. One decision that I will need to make is how important multiple monitors will be.

Then it would be a MacBook Pro with Retina display.

Only Apple

John Gruber over at his site, Daring Fireball, posted maybe my favorite piece on Apple from the post-WWDC maelstrom.

He titled it Only Apple.

If you like Apple, go ahead and read it. If you don’t, take it or leave it.

Categories
Business Life Technology

Tools and Jobs

In What Happened to the Month With Linux, I had this paragraph:

I lasted about five days before I gave in and decided that I’m just going to give up with trying to do anything like this and continue to use the best tool for the job for me, or (as my friend Aaron Spike has said), the tool most familiar to me.

I added the very last part of that paragraph after some texts with my friend, Aaron Spike. It got me thinking about what a “best tool” might look like for different people and it really does come down to what the two of us were talking about.

It isn’t enough to be a tool that can just get the job done. For every job, there are multitudes of ways to complete it using any number of tools. What makes a tool great probably gets down to the user being comfortable using it.

But maybe comfortable is not enough. The tool needs to make the user feel like they are able to accomplish more than they would when using another tool. It might just be a feeling, but the ability to “delight” (there is a terrible word to use for almost anything) makes the choice of tools to be a completely personal choice in almost every case.

That’s why I continue to come back to OS X and iOS, entirely because I FEEL like I can do more with them. It might not be true, but the feeling is very powerful.