Author: Bob Martens

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Technology

My Sysadmin Tool of Choice

The title might be a little facetious, but stay with me.

We recently underwent a semi-invasive project here on campus. It involved replacing the backbone switch for the entire campus and replacing it with a larger chassis which allowed us to consolidate some switches into the new chassis along with adding some 10G switching capacity (which we are now using for our VM storage systems).

What tool was the most important during that project? My iPad.

When a student was stating that their router was not connecting properly with the network, I needed the ability to easily check whether my changes were having an effect. Easiest way to do that? Use my iPad and OpenVPN.

We have a metric ton of projects sitting in the pipeline right now which range from pulling out the last of our Novell NetWare servers and replacing them with OES 11.2 to continuing the migration and consolidation of current services onto smaller VMs and SLES 11. That all comes with a lot of documentation I need to wade through and also using Trello to try to keep track of the moving parts.

What is with me for that? The iPad!

When my family and I recently took a vacation to visit my wife’s family in Milwaukee I wanted to bring along the minimal amount of technology so that we could also pack in a half-hog for my brother-in-law. I still needed to have access to the office and the ability to troubleshoot machines while I was on the road.

What made the cut? My iPad, complete with cellular internet connection, OpenVPN, and Prompt for working with my servers.

I did not originally imagine that this is how I would end up using the iPad.

The idea really stemmed around using the iPad to carry around documentation, and that was pretty much about it. Couple that with some email and web browsing capabilities I was going to be happy using it as my daily-carry machine. However, as I dug into the new iPad Air it became apparent that it could be used for so much  more (and in some cases, be better).

So as it stands right now, the iPad is my sysadmin tool of choice in many situations. Of course, there are many tools that I use in a given day, but I have been pleasantly surprised with how well my iPad Air has transitioned into more than just a daily-carry documentation tool.

Categories
Technology

Differences in Development

Development platforms for various operating systems and communities is a “sort of” past time of mine. I like to take a look at the various communities and technologies being used around the technology industry.

As a quick aside, is the term “technology industry” even useful anymore? Technology is used in so many different areas of life that maybe trying to lump all companies using technology as part of the “technology industry” is really quite ridiculous and limiting. Maybe.

Alright, back to the main topic.

I find Apple’s development tools and community to be completely and totally fascinating. The idea that the base of iOS and OS X development today can be traced all of the way back to NeXT and NeXTSTEP in the late 80s is almost ridiculous in a time where new frameworks and languages seemingly are popping up every day.

Just this morning I was typing NSMutableArray into Xcode and, look at that, the NS stands for NeXTSTEP!

Apple is still using Objective-C and they are continuing to develop that language at an increasing pace. That’s commitment to a platform. I guess you could expect that from a company that still calls its desktop computers Macs, which harkens back to 1984.

I counter the above about Apple with my experience on the web. It seems that every week there is a new web language, or web framework, or CSS pre-parser, or … you get the idea. I understand that the web is younger than the desktop development, but the shifting sands of the web are both exhilarating and frustrating.

The rapid pace of change (even when people within the web community decry how slow things move) can mean that nothing ever has time to actually, you know, mature to the point of being useful. Or if it does, the technology (where I think Rails might be getting to at the moment) is pilloried as too old, slow, and bad to use for anything serious.

Huh?

I can understand wanting to continue to push things forward, but there is something to be said to being consistent and moving what has been done ahead through hard work and dedication. Are we really so naive as to think that we need to continually make the same mistakes in the name of progress?

Categories
Technology

Packaging for Systems

Over at Standalone Sysadmin we have an article titled Just what we need…another package manager. The article was inspired by the news that Rust is going to be receiving a package manager of its own called Cargo, and then goes off on how many different package mangers there are out there for a single system to use.

By single system, I’m talking about Linux.

I don’t have answers, but it does seem like there is a new package manager attached to each and every operating system, programming language, and even individual systems themselves (like Chef and Puppet). It is all terribly dizzying if you want to try to get anything done.

Like I said, no answers on my end.

Of course anyone can work out an ideal in their head that focuses around a single, system-wide package manager which any programming language or disparate system could hook into (like a super-charged apt or zypper), but I’m not even sure we would want that.

The hard part is that we have bought into the idea that choice is always good, and that more of something good is obviously better. This post asks whether that can always be true.

Categories
Technology

OneNote in the Mac App Store

I’m not sure if this is new, but Microsoft has pushed an update for OneNote into the Mac App Store. I’m not seeing any version history on the app so I am thinking this is the first of the “big” Microsoft Office applications to show up in the Mac App Store.

The better question is this: is this a preview of what is to come for Office 2014?

Categories
Technology

Dangerous Precedent

The sheer number of online accounts one must keep track of is considered by many to be a problem. A username and password for each site can seem daunting, I won’t even try to deny that.

However, the alternative being brandied about right now is to just use Google as the main identify provider. This might seem like a noble goal, to have a single authority as our online identity, but besides the problem of having a single company with so much power, I ran into another issue this week.

Using a single provider encourages people to hand their information out to any site that asks for it. As a “technology person”, I know that I should look for Google’s OAuth login and check what the site is asking for access to and to be discerning … but does everyone care that much?

When that is encouraged, then when a scam site asks for those credentials, people are trained to hand them out without thinking too much about it. It is a similar situation to just click through the installation screens on Windows without reading what it is that is being installed … except the scammers get your username and password and, in the case of your email, access to almost everything else from there.

That is a dangerous precedent to set in the same of ease-of-use. Sometimes we need to ask if it is worth it.