#2 is the most important in that list.
New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#32"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 th…
Indeed.
Last place I worked with sysadmins, they were fire fighting like crazy, not enough of them, bad choice of suppliers, poor code bases meant things fell over and took far to long to run and a dev team begging to get off the internal network on to their own because of all the restrictions.
I needed a backup of the DB of one of the three systems to test a major setting change that no-one was 100% sure would work because no-one understood the bloody awful contractor code with the even more awfully designed DB.
Took them 2 weeks to get it to me.
Crazy place, quit after 2 months. Really thought I'd asked the right questions too.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#33Excuse my ignorance, but what's wrong with nslookup and ifconfig?
short answer: `/bin/ip` replaces `ifconfig` -- it's newer and more powerful more info: http://www.tty1.net/blog/2010/ifconfig-ip-comparison_en.html
Asides from ifconfig not being maintained (which is reason enough not to use it), I always wondered specifically what was broken with it.
Then I worked for an arbitrage desk at an investment bank. They used virtual addresses for different IPs, on top of vlans connected to different exchanges, redundantly (ie bonded).
Not a single IP-having interface appeared using ifconfig.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#34Earlier 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 Use dig instead of nslookup, and right from the ifconfig man page: NOTE This program is obsolete!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.
[deleted]
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#35I'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…
I don't know if you're aware, but configuration management is not a new concept. CFEngine was started in '93. CFEngine2 which is popular among many sysadmins came out in '98. While configuration management has definitely had some improvements it's not THAT far from what we've been using for decades now.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#36I'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…
Not aimed at exactly this use case but the first two thirds of my book Reliably Deploying Rails Applications https://leanpub.com/deploying_rails_applications is heavily chef focussed.
It's intended for use with Chef Solo but potentially the early sections on writing custom chef cookbooks may be of use.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#37"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 th…
I'm talking specifically about dedicated sys admins, since that's what the blog post is about; I'm no stranger to cowboy coding on a project that may or may not ever be worth anything. I've lost data once before to corrupted backups and I don't regret not investing more engineering effort. It was an MVP, and making better products gives me more leverage.
But by the time you're hiring full time for the position, outside of a few edge cases where maybe you're SnapChat and you are growing 20% a week, it's probably time to settle down a bit and be sensible. At which point, if testing your backups to completion to avoid catastrophic data loss isn't #1 on the todo list, it's #2.
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#38I'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…
We just built a simple tool that generates Ansible playbooks for you. Try it out at https://cmify.com
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 th…
I'm talking specifically about dedicated sys admins, since that's what the blog post is about; I'm no stranger to cowboy coding on a project that may or may not ever be worth anything. I've lost data once before to corrupted backups and I don't regret not investing more engineering effort. It was an MVP, and making better products gives me more leverage. But by the time you're hiring full time for the position, outsi…
It may be #2 perpetually in many cases because the boss will not listen when you insist it's important. For many it then starts slipping down the list, as what is best for the company is often not best for the employee: For many it becomes a reasonable (for them personally) risk to take to bet that they'll do better from keeping the boss satisfied now rather than spend time on backups to avoid a major disaster after they've left. And yes, that means gambling that the major disaster won't hit while you're still there.
I'm not saying this is how it should be, but it is how it often becomes if the sysadmin or whomever taking on those responsibilities don't report to someone who also see the data integrity as priority #1 for the sysadmin.
I've worked in places where the CEO's e-mail client configuration is the #1 priority for the guy that should have been focusing on server backups, for example, and where prioritising the backups would be a bad career move for the person in question.
(Yes, that is a huge warning sign that it's best to find a different job)
Re: New Year's Resolutions for SysAdmins
#40I'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…
It's what always kept me away from these systems. So many of them are hopelessly over-engineered to the point where it's often easier to write custom solutions.