| Systems Administration must die, die, die |
[Jun. 1st, 2008|03:06 pm] |
I really think that the term "Systems Administration" needs to go away. Use Systems Integrator, Systems Engineer (or Systems Reliability Engineer if you're Google) or some other term that more accurately represents the role.
I know there has been a lot of discussion about DSL's and Polyglot Programming around (eg http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-hope-polyglotism.html), but I know that good Systems Engineers regularly context switch between different DSLs (config file syntax, puppet) languages (shell, batch, sed, awk, perl, python, ruby, powershell).
From my own experience I might be debugging a core dumping application using gdb, then swapping puppet update something, followed by a dash of shell, a sprinkling of graphing in gnuplot (or gruff and ruby), then some Java. I don't think the word administration even comes close to explaining that.
I don't hear the term "Operator" in common usage for Systems Engineer, and I'd like to see Administrator go the same way. If you're recruiting for people think about the fact that words are powerful, think about the role and what it involves, then see if you feel that Administrator is the word you'd choose to fit that.
If you don't know what your friendly neighbourhood Systems Integrator does, ask her if she would mind you shadowing for a day, if you're developing you probably will learn a lot about how to write applications that are supportable just from understanding the pain points of debugging with just a log file! |
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| Thoughtworks Geek Night - Mocking 28th May |
[May. 20th, 2008|06:48 am] |
( details ) |
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| Shell history meme |
[Apr. 12th, 2008|06:34 pm] |
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( Read more... ) |
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| Tool of the day |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|05:43 pm] |
I was looking for something to simulate delay and latency on linux using netfilter or iptables and discovered Netem and the wonderful lagfactory script that did just what I wanted. |
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| Puppet and ctags |
[Feb. 11th, 2008|09:01 pm] |
Whilst finding my way around puppet, I realised that some of the tools I'm used to when developing in other languages weren't quite there.
A quick read through the ctags documentation and I knocked up a couple of simple regular expressions that enable me to quick navigate through a large, split out puppet configuration using vim. Adding the following to ~/.ctags will enable you to run ctags -R at the top of your puppet manifests and navigate through tags. I'll probably need to actually go through the language definition and ctags docs some more to provide more comprehensive functionality but this works for me right now so I wanted to share it.
--langdef=puppet
--langmap=puppet:.pp
--regex-puppet=/^class[ \t]*([:a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
--regex-puppet=/^site[ \t]*([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
--regex-puppet=/^node[ \t]*([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
--regex-puppet=/^define[ \t]*([:a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
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| Virtualisation libraries |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|10:06 am] |
Whilst looking into the progress of libvirt and use with VMWare and OS X, I discovered ivi which is a java library around VMWare, Xen, KVM and OpenVZ. Hopefully VMWare in libvirt won't be far off. |
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| Yaboot update |
[Jan. 4th, 2008|01:19 pm] |
It's taken me some time since I moved in to the new place to setup my test environment again, it's not ideal as I don't have as much ppc hardware as I used to but it's a start. The morning was spent getting dhcp setup, and ensuring neboot worked end to end with the iBook. Once that was done I could test yaboot git HEAD using netboot.
Some of the recent features are really useful, I love being able to netboot to test the netboot code, then do
device=hd partition=2 filename=yaboot.conf
To boot off the hard disk. The use of the initrd= to load an alternate initrd from the command line is an improvement I've wanted for a long time and is great. It's also a good start to adding multiple initramfs images.
There is also the bootonce feature which I've not really played with in anger, as I tend to do most of my yaboot testing via netboot, which is even easier now we support larger images. |
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| yaboot |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|04:34 pm] |
yaboot 1.3.14 is released
http://yaboot.ozlabs.org/
Once my Fedora account is sorted I'll update there.
Many nice things for enterprise ppc users - bootonce, pSeries netbooting, user confs, pxelinux style netbooting. |
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| Time for a change |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|03:31 pm] |
After much consideration - I've decided to pursue other opportunities outside of Red Hat. My last day is today.
It's been a tough call, Red Hat have been a fantastic employer but it's time for me to do something different with my days.
I'm still looking forward to being active in Fedora, RPM, yaboot and other communities in my free time. |
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| Perl/Python Module Finding |
[Feb. 9th, 2007|10:00 am] |
I had a look at Peter Gordon's python module finding code to work with rpmbuild.
I'd rather something use the modulefinder module.
Whilst we're at it'd also be nice if we could use Module::ScanDeps for the perl module finding. We really shouldn't be writing our own language specific dependency generators where good ones already exist. |
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| RPM developer position |
[Feb. 8th, 2007|09:51 am] |
There's a job at Red Hat for someone who wants to work with RPM, we want to build a bigger team around RPM and this should help
http://redhat.hrdpt.com/cgi-bin/a/highlightjob.cgi?jobid=1949
If you're interested drop me a line to let me know as well as applying online. |
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| Off on holiday |
[May. 31st, 2006|06:39 am] |
Just to let people know I'm away on holiday over the next week and a half and will be out of contact as I'll not be taking a computer and will be enjoying hiking, camping, etc. |
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| pysqlite memory fun |
[Feb. 1st, 2006|02:36 pm] |
Today got put on hold a bit due to the yum eating all the memory on the box issues on rawhide. I thought I'd share how I tracked it down. I noticed the issue doing a test install on an IBM OpenPower LPAR. Thinking it was the lpar, I boosted the memory - but noted that I got OOM killer regardless of memory. In car hypothesis - probably sqlite upgrade, confirmed on getting to office on cube mates machine, whilst mine booted up. Start tracking down.
( gorey details... ) |
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| RPM Guide Available |
[Nov. 3rd, 2005|05:21 pm] |
I'm very pleased to announce that the Red Hat RPM Guide has been made
available under the Open Publication Licence, Version 1.0.
http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/drafts/rpm-guide-en/
This is much more recent than Maximum RPM and gives a good starting
point to work towards living documentation for RPM. Although some
sections - notably Chapter 7 requires a complete rewrite. However I
wanted to get it out in it's current form (basically as published plus
errata).
Participation through normal Fedora Documentation process:
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
I'll be attempting to form a team to help edit/update content. If you
want to help please follow up to fedora-docs-list. |
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| rpm-python |
[Sep. 15th, 2005|09:11 am] |
Josh found
On the topic of the python rpm bindings ...
I had a terrible time figuring them out. Luckily I found enough from reading yum source and trial and error, I think I know what I need to know no
Did you manage to find my slides which serve as a basic introduction:
http://people.redhat.com/pnasrat/rpm-python/rpm-python-slides/frames.html
I'm well aware that it'd be nice to have some more documentation, and I'm working on gettinng something out but it's taking more time than I'd like. |
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| SLOF |
[Jul. 13th, 2005|01:36 am] |
Played with SLOF a little this evening, ended up building with a cross compiler and uploading to the js20 I have access too:
0 > .properties
Not happy
0 > dev / dev Exception #-63
words worked, but the formatting could be improved. The documented set-bootpart followed by boot got yaboot, kernel and initrd loaded. I'll try test some more when I get a chance, along with maybe looking at how I can fix some things up some...
In other news anaconda+yum still going strong, spending some time on update releases for the next few days, then back to schedule. |
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| Yum in anaconda |
[Jul. 9th, 2005|12:30 pm] |
I've just done my first install using yum within anaconda on my iMac. It worked pretty well for a first cut, although lvm2 got installed after kernel so I needed to regenerate the initrd in rescue mode.
I'll work out that and any other issues on Monday, but things are looking good for hitting the first deadline:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/YumBackend
Then clean up the code some and get http/ftp working too. I'll drop a progress update to anaconda-devel list on Monday. |
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| Wireless and ISO's and SLOF - oh my! |
[Jul. 2nd, 2005|08:46 am] |
Thanks to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kernelslacker my orinoco based card now does scanning with the rawhide kernel (looks like the FC4 update does too). I decided to setup NetworkManager-vpnc from extras and it's all working fine for me atm.
I'm going to be focussing on putting yum into anaconda next week - an initial proposed schedule is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/YumBackend
I'm glad to see that SLOF on the Cell has got network support and I assume obp-tftp package - will we be seeing a SLOF update with obp-tftp sometime soon?
As far as zaitcev's CD ROM size on change fun, I'm looking at a similar issue on i5, except with virtual I/O serving ISO's as the CD ROM. Oddly the legacy iSeries viocd driver on the i825 I have access to seems to behave as you would expect, by actually updating the size:
# cat /sys/block/iseries\!vcdd/size
472168 Change ISO in os400 Image catalog
# dd if=/dev/iseries/vcdd of=/dev/zero bs=1k
628434+0 records in
628434+0 records out
# cat /sys/block/iseries\!vcdd/size
1256868
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accomplished