spp's blog

National Clean Up Your Computer Month

spp — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 11:41:51 -0800

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.

Black Belt Systems Administration: Embrace Your Limits

spp — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:05:17 -0700

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).

Black Belt Systems Administration: Don't block with your face

spp — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:27:35 -0700

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.

10 Ultimate Rules for Effective System Administration

spp — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:04:18 -0700

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.

Black Belt Systems Administration: A punch is just a punch

spp — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:09:16 -0700

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.

Mixing Multiple Volume Managers (especially ZFS and VxVM)

spp — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:15:13 -0700

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.

Thought for the day: Greatness

spp — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:21:48 -0700

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

Jung Shin Tong Il

spp — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:52:56 -0700

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.

What I've found on the web about Solaris 10 Update 5

spp — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 12:33:35 -0800

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.

Cool Gift: Rush Vintage Picture 2008 Calendar

spp — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:24:35 -0700

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.

Hot IT jobs: Systems administrator

spp — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 07:51:42 -0700

Here's an article from ComputerWorld/IDG, talking about what SAs are, and how companies should look for them. Not a very good article, as it undersells our value. Maybe someone can right a response to the author and get a better article published.

Novell "Not in the Unix Business"

spp — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 09:26:01 -0700

Earlier this week, after the US Courts ruled that Novell owned the copyrights to Unix, Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry -- trying to reassure the Linux community about Novell's good intentions -- proclaimed that Novell is "not even in the Unix business any more."

If they're not in the business, then that means the copyrights are essentially worthless to them. There are however at least three big players still in the Unix business: Sun, IBM, and HP. There's several smaller players in the business, but really no one else worth mentioning.

IBM to resell Solaris on Xseries

spp — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 11:55:03 -0700

I just sat in on the teleconference with Sun and IBM announcing that IBM will become the first tier one vendor to resell Solaris on X86. Although HP has supported running Solaris on their Proliant line for several years, they have never had a reseller agreement or any kind of cooperative engineering agreement with Sun. IBM now has both; not only will they resell Solaris through their sales channels, but they will also be devoting engineering resources to optimize Solaris for their servers.

There was also "direction" given that there is a port of Solaris to Zseries (mainframe) that is being developed by a third party with both Sun and IBM's direct support. However, there was no announcement that this will ever be an official offering, only that both companies have received "significant" customer demand for it, and would like to see it happen.

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day

spp — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 18:49:22 -0700

Happy Sysadmin Appreciation Day

Great gifts for sysadmins include LOPSA memberships and registrations to LOPSA Sysadmin Days - Philidelphia

Check it out, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems has posted a blog entry about Sysadmin Appreciation Day! Thanks, Jonathan, for helping us get the word out about our profession!

Technology Decision Making with POETS

spp — Mon, 28 May 2007 10:18:24 -0700

No, I'm not talking about using the wit of Walt Whitman or the eccentricities of Emily Dickinson for choosing technology. Nor am I talking about some new program that automates decision making for you. I'm talking about what I see as being the five main dimensions of technology decision making.

I am asked repeatedly by my customers why they should choose a particular technology over another. Quite often the choice is between two relatively "equal" technologies, where there isn't a cut and dried answer for which is best. For example, I've been asked how to decide between Solaris and Linux, two very good operating systems, which can generally solve the same problems. Or, more recently, as I've worked on the Solaris virtualization strategy for our company, between Zones/Containers and LDOMs.