January, being the beginning of the new year, is also the month when people clear out the old junk and prepare to start anew. Everyone makes their resolutions to be healthier, to exercise and eat right, to organize their lives better. I read in the paper today that January is officially the National Clean Up Your Computer Month, so how many people have made resolutions regarding the health of their computers?

So, this month as part of LOPSA's mission "to serve the public through outreach and education on system administration issues", help someone (and help yourself) clean up a computer system.

Systems administrators are magical wizards that know everything and can make computers sing, dance, and do various other parlor tricks. As someone who carries the title, everyone assumes you can do the same. Whether it is a brand new application that no one has ever seen before, a telephone system that has nothing to do with computers, or a very old server running an OS where the vendor went out of business in the last century, you're a systems administrator, you know all about it. And, for one of a various hundred or so possible reasons, you are afraid to let that image falter.

In our martial arts training, we are constantly told to know our limits, to acknowledge our limits, to stretch our limits, and when we train with someone, to tell them our limits. Knowing, acknowledging, stretching, and expressing our limits is useful for many reasons: it teaches us humility, it teaches us to seek assistance, it teaches us to overcome our limits, and perhaps most importantly, it prevents us getting hurt. If we don't recognize our limits, we cannot improve beyond our limits. If we don't stretch our limits, we may try to do something significantly beyond our ability and hurt ourselves or others. If we don't express our limits, our partner may assume we know or can do more than we can, and may accidentally hurt us (or us hurt them).

One of the Masters (6th Dan) at my Tae Kwon Do school, Master Robert Gross, has developed his Ten Commandments of Martial Arts. He has very graciously permitted me to use the first of his commandments, "Thou shalt not block with thy face" for one of my Black Belt Systems Administration topics. The first corollary for this is "Don't drop your arms". From a martial arts viewpoint, this is pretty easy to understand. Your arms are used to block attacks. Your head is vital, if you get hit there, you are much more likely to loose.

From a systems administration perspective, we can think of this as "protect your vulnerable points". Look at your environment, what are the most vital points that if they get compromised will compromise your entire environment? This scales from the view of a single system, where you protect your administrative account up to the largest environments where you use firewalls to make sure that outsiders can only access your web server and only over the authorized web port.

I saw on one of the news sites (Slashdot or OSNews, forget which exactly) a story about the following 10 Essential Rules for System Administrators. These are mostly pretty basic and many of them are not really SA specific. I'm not certain that "backup regularly" and "test your backups regularly" are deserving of being two separate rules; I consider that testing backups is part of the overall backup process.

One thing I thought was kind of interesting was the timing of this coming out with the number one rule being "Keep it Simple" and my first Black Belt System Administration topic "A punch is just a punch", which is not specifically about system design but about sticking with the basics.

I've been posting some of my Tae Kwon Do belt test thesis papers to my blog, and for some reason they seem to be fairly popular. I've had an idea to start a series of posts that tie some of our martial arts lessons/philosophy to systems administration. I'm not a black belt (yet), I just got my green belt (6th Gup) on July 20th, but I don't think anyone will send the Ninja squads after me for titling this series "Black Belt Systems Administration".

So, for the first installment, I pay homage to the best known martial artist of all time, Bruce Lee. Lee is quoted as saying, "Before I learned martial arts, a punch was just a punch and a kick was just a kick. When I studied martial arts, a punch was no longer just a punch and a kick was no longer just a kick. Now I understand martial arts, and a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick." This quote can be associated with most anything in life, not just systems administration. What Lee is saying is that when we first start something, it often seems very simple and we concentrate on the basics. As we learn more about it, we focus on the details and forget the basics. Once we know something, we ignore the details and go back to the basics again.

I've recently had a number of projects at work that want to mix multiple volume managers on a single server, specifically ZFS and VxVM for SAN volumes (actually, three including SVM for internal boot disk mirroring). The projects generally are for database servers, and want to use VxVM for database volumes because ZFS currently has some serious limitation on database size (limited number of devices recommended in a single zpool) and performance (single threaded checksumming, for one). However, at the same time, they want to have access to some of ZFS's features (in particular, the ability to oversubscribe filesystems, dynamic resize, snapshots and rollback) for some of the other filesystems.

It is not the extraordinary that no one else can do
But the ordinary that no one else will do

Late last year, I started to take Tae Kwon Do lessons. It started out because my son was interested, and I wanted to encourage him. I found out that there is a veritable Tae Kwon Do legend living in the Columbus area and teaching just a few miles from my house. Sr. Grandmaster (9th Dan) Joon Pyo Choi is a veteran Olympic Coach, recipient of the 2007 US Tae Kwon Do Grandmasters Society Coach of the Year, past multi-year Korean National Champion (equivalent of current World Champion ranking), and founder of the International Oriental Martial Arts College.

The experience of training under GM Choi has been amazing. His philosophy encompasses not just TKD but holistic life experience, including the Kimoodo Healing Arts and the Moogong Ryu (Way of the Peaceful Warrior) style that he developed.

I'm trying to put together some of my technology roadmap for 2008 at my current job. Until I get an update from Sun under our NDA, here's what I've found on the web about the next Solaris 10 update:

• Due Spring/Summer (sometime between April and June)
• CPU capping of zones through means other than processor sets
• ZFS enhancements
  • ZFS boot
  • ZFS resize (shrink)
  • ZFS compression (gzip)
• Trusted Extensions bug fixes

I'll keep adding more as I find them; feel free to post comments if you find any that I haven't.

My very wonderful wife just got me the coolest present.

Totally awesome out of the blue gift. I've been a huge Rush fan for years, and this is going to have a place of honor on my office wall. Each month has historically "significant" events listed on some of the days, such as January 1: "1980 - Permanent Waves is released". A desktop day calendar which had something to look at every day would be really neat, but I guess it is probably hard to find something significant for every day.