I learned #2 very early on. Further, the specs I give for a project are the very minimum. If you aren't willing to do things correctly the first time, I'm not willing to be a client.
New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
21–30 of 46 posts
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#22Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?
They've been replaced with ipadm/dladm: http://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration
And dnsip/dnsipq/dnsmx/dnsname/dnstxt: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tools.html
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#23I'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…
Try with ansible.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#24I'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…
Good stuff! Thanks!
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#25"Check that your backups are working the way you think they are."
I'm a bit horrified to read this here. If you're a sysadmin and don't have both automated and manual testing of backups, it's hard to imagine what else was a more important use of your time.
There aren't many things that could bankrupt a healthy business overnight, but catastrophic data loss is certainly one of them.
An analogous entry for a lawyer might be to pay attention while reading contracts.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#26"Check that your backups are working the way you think they are." I'm a bit horrified to read this here. If you're a sysadmin and don't have both automated and manual testing of backups, it's hard to imagine what else was a more important use of your time. There aren't many things that could bankrupt a healthy business overnight, but catastrophic data loss is certainly one of them. An analogous entry for a lawyer mig…
> what else was a more important use of your time
Keeping shit running now is always more important than keeping shit running in case of catastrophic failure.
Because a catastrophic failure is only catastrophic if you actually have something of value in the first place.
In the real world it's a balancing act in which there is no room for absolutism. Choosing which compromises to make is the hardest part of any job that comes with a level of responsibility.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#27Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?
On nslookup, in particular, the program has some ambiguous behavior and can be problematic when trying to debug certain DNS issues. Dig was developed to be a reliable replacement that has predictable behavior at all times. There is a companion to dig called "host" that is a simple lookup, including looking up in-addr.arpa entries ("host 8.8.8.8"). In most cases, you will get more consistent results by using dig and host, which is why nslookup is deprecated.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Try with ansible.
Agreed.
As well as the reasonably good ansible documentation, checkout the ansible-examples github repo. ( https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples )
There's a few initial 'conventions' to figure out (roles, group vars, playbooks), but then it's so incredibly simple to get into.
My dad is playing with a raspberry pi at home, wanting to set up a web kiosk thing. I'd been doing something similar a few months ago for work, so I send him my ansible playbook. He could follow it as if it were a plain text checklist/tutorial, without needing ansible at all. If he wants to automate it, he can.
That, I think, is one of the benefits of ansible. It's not a lot more work than just writing an overview of what you need to do in the first place, but with the benefit of it being repeatable and automated.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#29Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?
They've been replaced with ipadm/dladm: http://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration And dnsip/dnsipq/dnsmx/dnsname/dnstxt: http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/tools.html
What? Your reply seems purposefully disingenuous and misleading. The ipadm and dladm commands seem to be specific to Solaris and derivatives. And I can not believe that you are seriously proposing that the new standard commands for doing DNS is to use DJB’s tools.
What the original post most likely referred to is to use ip instead of ifconfig, and to use dig instead of nslookup.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#30I'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…
Chef is a bad bet if you don't want unnecessary complexity - it's practically designed to be unnecessarily complex.