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New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

usenix.org

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#11
post #6
post #3

Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?

They're a bit dated. Use dig instead of nslookup, and right from the ifconfig man page: NOTE This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.

This is Linux specific advice for ifconfig, correct?

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#12
post #6
post #3

Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?

They're a bit dated. Use dig instead of nslookup, and right from the ifconfig man page: NOTE This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.

Where does it say that?

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ifconfig

Pedantry, but keep in mind that there isn't really "the" man page for this.

Ubuntu might want to deprecate ifconfig, but that doesn't mean everyone does.

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#14
post #2

I'd also recommend any sysadmin to start looking into an automation framework like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or any other of the myriad options.

Automation is a fine thing except for some of this damn "enterprise software" that not only doesn't automate real well[1], but actually cannot be installed on VMWare[2] or even go to a hot swap machine[3]. Sysadmins always love government required software and stuff bought before we got there. 1) luckily backup seem to be reasonably automation friendly 2) "We do not support virtualization of any kind" 3) tied to hard…

You might find this interesting: http://www.slideshare.net/opscode/chef-vmwarewebinarslidesse...

I personally haven't tried building environments on VMWare as I run pretty much everything in AWS. However, this presentation looks promising.

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation is a fine thing except for some of this damn "enterprise software" that not only doesn't automate real well[1], but actually cannot be installed on VMWare[2] or even go to a hot swap machine[3]. Sysadmins always love government required software and stuff bought before we got there. 1) luckily backup seem to be reasonably automation friendly 2) "We do not support virtualization of any kind" 3) tied to hard…

You might find this interesting: http://www.slideshare.net/opscode/chef-vmwarewebinarslidesse... I personally haven't tried building environments on VMWare as I run pretty much everything in AWS. However, this presentation looks promising.

Since the government vendor's software "cannot run" VMWare, I cannot quite use the results.

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#16
post #2

I'd also recommend any sysadmin to start looking into an automation framework like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or any other of the myriad options.

> start looking into an automation framework

Cannot stress this enough! There is a sea change happening and sysadmins run the risk of being swept away unless they learn about automation (puppet/chef) software and cloud infrastructure services (openstack/aws). My new years resolution is to release screencasts on these very subjects. I have already released one on Learning Puppet with Vagrant @ http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/8-learning-puppet-with-vag... if anyone is interested.

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#17
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a bit dated. Use dig instead of nslookup, and right from the ifconfig man page: NOTE This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.

This is Linux specific advice for ifconfig, correct?

Yes

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#18
post #12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a bit dated. Use dig instead of nslookup, and right from the ifconfig man page: NOTE This program is obsolete! For replacement check ip addr and ip link. For statistics use ip -s link.

Where does it say that? http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ifconfig Pedantry, but keep in mind that there isn't really "the" man page for this. Ubuntu might want to deprecate ifconfig, but that doesn't mean everyone does.

You're right, and I use OpenBSD myself so I should have qualified it. The man page I quoted was CentOS in this case.

Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins

#20
post #2

I'd also recommend any sysadmin to start looking into an automation framework like Chef, Puppet, Ansible, or any other of the myriad options.

I just started digging into chef with the intention of using with AWS opsworks and... holy complexity. There just doesn't seem to be any obvious entry point, as far as I can tell. I've spent two entire days searching and there doesn't seem to be anything in between "hello wordpress" and "read this 300+ page user manual". Can anyone recommend a hands on guide for setting up a multi-node stack with opsworks that isn't just plain vanilla templates? I was really impressed by Richard Seroter's videos on AWS at pluralsight, but they are more of a 30,000 foot overview and gloss over implementation details, for the most part (even at 10+ hours). The project I'm working on is mostly a pretty straightforward node service running on postgres, but it uses some custom services that need to scale horizontally, and host sensitive data that should probably be running in a VPC.

Edit: I'm also having a difficult time trying to figure out how to get up to speed with chef in the specific context of opsworks, since most of the chef-specific courseware I can find assumes I'm using a hosted chef server, and I'm not quite sure how that overlaps with the opsworks flavor. It's starting to feel like I'll be at this for another week before I can get even a simple stack running.

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