Bond Moment
I’ve decided that my daily 007 time is those few minutes spent on the throne at work. You spend those moments listening in to all the sounds going on around you. Is the person coming in or going out? Did they wash their hands? Why are they making that annoying sound? Also I watch the shoes pass by in front of the stall and try to decipher whom they belong to, maybe this is why women notice shoes much more then men. Generally guys spend their time at the urinal and don’t get to look at much other than what is right in front of them while women have more time to ponder the mysterious feet of the fellow restroomies. It’s funny how much you can key into those things within a bland confines of a stall.
every once in awhile
Sometimes I wonder at all the things I could be doing if I was more focused and could concentrate on getting one project done at a time. Then at times I see an example of someone who has managed to do such a thing and am thankful that I don’t
Facilitating
So it looks like we’ll be moving to CoSentry up north in KC near the airport for our new hosting facility, since the location we are at now will be closing down in a few months. That means as the newly appointed sysadmin I also am plotting out the move to the new hosting facility. I’ve been involved in our move from Boston to Sprint in south KC and then from Sprint to Switch and Data ( I was the first guy on the scene pulling wiring and taking down servers in that move) this time I’m ultimately responsible though and the man who’s ass it is if things don’t go well. I’m getting a little nervous about the whole thing but I’m also looking forward to it. If my database migration for MySQL4.1 to MySQL5.0 this weekend was any indication of how things will go, then the gods are smiling upon me.
I’ve put a whole new slew of remote management devices on the list for the new server racks because my living location and the hosting facility will be on almost opposite side of Kansas City. With the new remote controled power distribution units and remote console servers I should be able to do about everything from the office/home. If all the pieces don’t play nicely though I’m in for a world of hurt and there are going to be some long trips involved. Cable management and making sense of servers and location are a number one priority, well after having everything working that is. The goal is for the area to be showable location and something to impress clients and show them we know what we are doing.
I’ve been playing around with the new RHEL5 and Xen and I’m suitably impressed. I’ve gotten it up and running with a few virtual servers on a desktop but haven’t had enough time down at our current facility to get it up going on a server and see how well it runs there. I’m interested in seeing what it will do on one of our DL360 G5s with the virtualization extensions built in and if Ubuntu will run well with RHEL being the hypervisor, it should all work in theory. The ability to run virtual machines in the manner Xen allows will have a huge impact on our business and allow us to do a number of things we previously couldn’t, mainly in the area of segmenting servers by application so we can better see what is going on where and how resources are best used rather than lumping it all into one area to such a degree that it becomes one mass of uncontrolable goo.
I’ve been sending off notices at work and cc’ing about everyone in the world and I hope they aren’t taken as being to commanding or taken in the wrong light. My goal is to keep everyone informed about what’s going on because we do have a dreadful lack of communication and rather then complain about it more I suppose I might as well just start giving everyone info, they can read it or toss it out unread if they want. In either event I passed things along and maybe others will follow the example and we can all get on the same page, additionally I think there is a stigma that the programmers are uncooperative and I’d like to remove that.
MacBook
So we got MacBook Pros at work for our latest round of laptops. Being that we are and equal oppertunity employer we had the choice between new Dells or the Macs and we thought we’d give the macs a try. As soon as I got mine I installed Parallels and got a Ubuntu and XP virtual machine up and running. Ubuntu isn’t officially supported so I guess I should have expected it to be crashing every once in awhile. I can’t work like that though so I’ve ended up working on getting everything to work in the mac world.
There are a few apps that I’ve found I needed in order to get this going, first off was Adium which was my replacement for Gaim. Entourage is our replacement for Evolution and I’m not totally sold on that yet but it seems to be working okay. For an IRC client I ended up with X-Chat Aqua which was a function I previously had setup in Gaim, but it might be better this way as I’ll get distracted less often by IRC when checking my messages. I ended up doing battle with Fink and at this point I’ve got Gnome, Gimp2.2 and apt tools running under Darwin X. There is also a remote desktop client out there which has worked very well so far, I admit I didn’t try out anything else looking for a solution as this was the first thing I ran across and it seemed to fit the bill. MySQL tools have a mac port that even includes a desktop widget that I haven’t tried out yet, but it looks interesting. Firefox seems to run well enough and I’ve spent a little while out getting my extensions put in, hopefully they make my screen shots sexier.
The real pain for me is adjusting to the mac, the whole Command instead of Alt and the lack of a right click is a tough thing to get over. Learning to Command – Tab and Command – Tilde to rotate windows is taking a bit of learning as well as learning how to hide and bring things back and use hot corners and the dashboard feature. I had thought untabbed terminals would be a real pain but it’s not turning out to be as much or a problem as I had originally though it would be. The thing that bothers me the most though is a click the red x on Firefox, and while the window does go away the app is still open, that is going to take awhile to get used to. Overall though I’d have to say the conversion is going well but I don’t think I’ll be a power user for a little while. I suppose I’ve still got my Ubuntu in a virt machine if I get really frustrated by something or think I’m missing a piece I need.
As far as portability, battery life, weight of the machine, wireless and feel of the keys the hardware itself is light years beyond the D800 I was using before. I think it would even have been a good investement had I gone and wiped out OSX and went with a base install of Fedora or Ubuntu. For those people out there with kids, it’s a small thing but the way the power cord works with a magnetic hold that’s enough to keep it attached but not on there real tight has already saved the laptop from multiple spills on the floor.
48 hrs
It’s been one of those past couple days where not a whole lot has gone right. Monday our primary webservers at work decided to start flipping out. They’ve been heavily loaded for quite awhile and pushing max on memory and the day finally came where they started bogging down. The mod_perl processes are getting way to big and we don’t have enough servers to effectively spread the load out so we’re really toeing the edge there. On top of that the MySQL Server and XML RPC Server decided to be pissy and not talk to each other nicely. Once I got all of that sorted out the perlbal instance that was running on the XML RPC Server which just so happens to balance about 30M of traffic flipped out and couldn’t open enough file descriptors and once that was fixed it then would die mysteriously. Some more work and I’ve got all that figured out finally and running decently last night, 48 hours of work ARGH. So I go to put a light fixture in the room we’re using for our computers and slash my left index finger with a box knife trying to remove a little bit of drywall around the fixture hole. Since I type for a living it is a very annoying thing to have a big cut right on the tip of your finger. Once the light fixture is in and it’s about 10:00 last night I figure it’s time to kick back and little and go downstairs to hop on my PC, I just start hoping around and the processor fan bites it and I can’t turn my desktop on until I get a new fan, that of course is assuming the fan going out didn’t cause my processor to overheat enough that it fried itself. So it’s just the work laptop for me today, I suppose it could be worse.
Today has to be a better day, it’s Valentine’s day. Kate and I are putting any V. Day festivities off until this weekend when hopefully we can take the kids over to Nana’s and manage to get a few free hours. It had better offically be Wednesday today and not another Monday that decided to revist the week like it did on Tuesday.
Quote of the Day
“R2D2 is remotely administered via SSH.”
This is something I always expected to be true
sysadmin++
So it looks like I am headed to the SysAdmin role. I had a talk with our CEO today and he’s all for the idea, which is good because I wasn’t sure how he’d feel about it. Ideally it should be the new CTO’s decision but he started just a few weeks ago and Chris is the man with the magic stick and in the end if he doesn’t want to pull the trigger, no boom. There will be a whole list of items for me to learn and a few things that I think need to be straightened out a bit. Being a person freshly stepping into the role will help get some of the things done that we couldn’t push through before. I believe after you do the same job for awhile and fulfill that role, people tend to blow you off. Ideally this shuffle will change that and when we talk about needing things to insure the business runs it will be taken to heart rather then looking like petulant children groaning. It’s possible some of this will change with the fact that we have a CTO looking out for the interests of technology now, we’ll have to see. Being the only person in a position is not something I really advocate and eventually we will need to have two SysAdmins or at least another programmer/techie with interest in SysAdmin work. Absolute power corrupts and while I will strive to be the benevolent dictator, at some point the company will need someone looking over my shoulder to help make decisions. When you are the only one calling the shots it is always “my way”, from experience this has worked out decently well but in general things run much better when there is some sort of meeting of the minds.
Kate has asked me if this was a step up and I’m not really sure that it is, it’s probably more of a lateral move and in another company stepping into SysAdmin from being the DBA would most likely be a downward move. In our company though the small business aspect of it makes the roles really blurry, each of us covers much more then what our job title or job description includes. What this move will do is put a lot of responsibility squarely on my shoulders and if I screw it up then I will be directly accountable. If it all works I may get kudos or I may get nothing, much of that rides on how the new CTO works out and where the company finds itself within the next year. In any scenario it will put me in a much larger arena of decision making that directly effects the company, which is something I’ve been looking for. In the past I’ve had many issues with where things are going and how things are happening, but there are indicators now that a new breeze is about to blow and in my fresh schooner I’ll have to evaluate whether I’ll be tacking into the wind or catching a gale that leads to the new world.
More plugins
Well of course it’s not good enough to just have my rantings posted in one place so I’m trying out this Live+Press plugin in WordPress to see if it will kick everything across to LJ. Why do I feel the need to have things like that, I really don’t know. I think it’s because I read everyone elses LJ so I feel like I need to contribute to the cause (that makes it sound so noble). Individualism vs being part of the larger group, isn’t that always the battle?
SysAdmin
Our current SysAdmin is going to move over to another group and become a C# programmer. Which leaves a hole in our group of five geeks at the company, so today I let the powers that be know that I was interested in the SysAdmin position. Currently I do a fair amount of Sysadmin work, monitoring and trouble shooting load on servers and updating packages and servers here and there. I implemented our SNMP monitoring system and am probably the most active person watching the the ebb and flows within their world. On the downside my network knowledge is fairly limited. I know the difference between a switch, hub, router and firewall but I’d have a tough time telling you the difference between what network Layer 3 and 2 were if you stopped me cold on the street. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of mulling over where I want to head in my career and whether it would be best served to do so with the company or head elsewhere. There are a lot of things on the plus side where I work at, but it’s a small company and there isn’t much room to move up. I imagine in the move to SysAdminship I would still be the DBA, while we have a fairly active database at this point it is also not a very complex setup ( Thank you MySQL!!! ), but my programming duties would be curtailed. Samuel who we brought on recently has really stepped up to the plate and added to the already great team so losing me as a programmer wouldn’t be nearly as painful as trying to fully replace the SysAdmin position. Taking on SysAdmin full time would add nicely to the set of skills I’ve been hoarding over the years and help me round out my experience in the tech world. The guys I work with think there is no way I wouldn’t get the job, but I’m not sure on how easily it is for me to be had with no college degree nor certs to my name. If someone is stuck on my education I have none, but my work experience is great and I have yet to find the challenge I haven’t met head on and overcome.
In talks recently I’ve also mentioned that I’m much more interested in the business side. Over that last few years it’s been a point I’ve been trying to drive home repeatedly but I don’t think anyone takes me seriously. I don’t have any business background so I have the feeling that the many ideas I present are passed over and I won’t gain any traction there. That’s why I think the SysAdmin thing would work out very well for me, it’s the one area I can’t really put down that I’ve held the reigns of and surpassed all expectations in; Client Support .. check, Desktop Support .. check, Programmer .. check, DBA.. check. So I say bring it on and let me kick some ass in yet another position.