Tag: System Administration

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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

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
Business Technology

Replacing the Bad

I was watching a talk recently by Bob Mahar and this quote jumped out at me:

If you do something poorly. It’s easily supplanted by anything.

I take this as a warning against complacency in technology. Many times it is comfortable to let systems continue to run until they start causing problems. An issue arises when things have gotten to the point that they can be replaced by anything just because “it is better”. When you get to that point, ANYTHING is better, even solutions which are overall worse in the long run.

That is one reason to keep pushing forward with new technologies and updates. You want to be able to make the best decisions possible, but replacing technology that doesn’t work can sometimes lead to sub par solutions.

Categories
Business Life Technology

Making Decisions

When questions arise and you need to start making decisions, how does one start? What is the framework one might use to frame the discussion. You need something to start with, some way to start to try to piece together what a single decision might mean.

How you frame decisions is a good way to judge what is important in your company or just important to you. Is price the determining factor at all times? Well, that says something about what you value (good or bad). Do you look for what everyone else is using? The newest? The fastest? Best value? Least cost-of-ownership? Most readily available? Allows you the most control? Allows you the least control?

There are thousands if not millions of other questions you can use to frame a decision, and each one says something slightly different about you, your company, and what you value. Good or bad.

Here are some questions I am currently sing to frame decisions at work:

  • Is this something we need to do?
  • Is this something we should be doing?
  • Should this be do-able on a mobile platform?
  • Do we need to have a mobile solution for this?
  • Are we legally able to do this?
  • How much extra effort will this take?
  • Do we have the expertise to do this well?
  • Do we have the resources in place to do this well?
  • Why are we going to do this?
  • Where is the money coming from?
  • Who is pushing for this?
  • Why are they pushing for this?

That is just a sampling, but they are usually floating up in my noggin just waiting for answers. If you look at this, almost every one of them could have the answer of “no”, and that is important because you need to be able to say “no” to things that really need it.

Does every question need a “yes” answer in order for you to do something? Of course not, but every question’s answer needs to be weighed in some manner so that you can make an informed decision when the time comes. Otherwise you are just making arbitrary decisions without really thinking things through.

Categories
Technology

The Importance of HCLs

This is going to get a complete and total “DUH” from many of my system administrator friends out there, but I thought I would just share my experience as well … and why I should never just expect that a little extra work will be worth it in the end.

We run XenServer here on campus for our virtualization infrastructure and have been relatively pleased with how it has fit out needs. While updates should be trivial, a decision I made definitely complicated things far beyond what they needed to be.

For all other servers on campus we use Adaptec RAID controllers and have been very happy with them. We also used them in our storage boxes (running Ubuntu 12.04). They have been rock-solid and so I wanted to stick with what we know when it came to the XenServer host boxes as well.

The only problem is that Adaptec is not well-supported by XenServer. You can do it (and we did originally) by creating driver disks every time a new kernel is installed. That means that normal updates can cause headaches as you wait for the DDK to drop, then create the driver disk, and then hope that the driver installation works when you install the update. We did it a number of times and it worked fine, but it was not ideal.

It also caused an issue where we could not move from XenServer 6.1 to the new, open source, XenServer 6.2 at least in part because we were using Adaptec RAID controllers. That was enough. So I finally sat down with the HCLs for XenServer 6.0.2, XenServer 6.1, and XenServer 6.2 and worked to find a RAID card to help us with the upgrade to XenServer 6.2 and also push us into the future as well.

Needless to say, I found one, and I wish I would have done this sooner.

Working with a supported RAID controller has the following benefit, so far:

  • installation is faster because I do not need to install separate drivers for the RAID controllers
  • updates as faster because I do not need to have driver disks for each kernel update
  • upgrades are faster (and possible) because I can now do an upgrade to the XenServer pool without needing to do a fresh reinstall and migration of VMs
  • I have peace of mind because if something happens, I’m just a reinstall away from a working box again … regardless of whether I have the driver disks anymore or not

So I’ve learned my lesson. I am now going to pour over the HCL for a given software package before I go off making decisions. Fortunately we have use for the Adaptec cards I am replacing … and I am very happy to finally be rid of them soon in our XenServer host boxes.