Its that time of the year again. Happy SysAdmin Day everyone.
If today is dragging, might want to refresh your memory of the great OddTodd… always a pick-me-up.
Archive for July, 2010
Happy SysAdmins Day
Friday, July 30th, 2010Diversion: Ode to Lego Technic
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010Nova, my first daughter, is now 6 and Glenn, my first son, is now 5. As a GeekDad I ensure to bathe them in geeky goodness. I’ve been thankful that Glenn is obsessed with Lego. The kool thing about it is that of course, I get to help him, so its just a great time. Here was last nights project:
Teaching him has gotten me thinking back to my own youth. I had a box of Lego’s but not a lot of sets. The one that I did get was in 1988, when my parents got me perhaps my favorite (but forgotten until recently) toy of youth: the Lego Technic 8865 “Test Car”.
That set was amazing. I proudly displayed it on my shelf in my room, both because of my pride in building it as well as just how outright kool it is.
Since that time Technic has grown up as much as I have. Take a look at the Technic Lego 8421 Mobile Crane:
So tempted to buy that. I already have the Ferrari F1 set, which Tamarah bought for my birthday several years ago.
But most fun of all… this week Glenn is in a one-week Lego Pre-Engineering class. For 3 hours a day they geek out and build all manner of fun stuff.
One thing I’ll throw out there for Dad’s… Lego has an Education dept: Lego Education. Of particular interest to Tamarah and I, is that they have a complete Homeschool Curriculum and various kits, including robotics kits, for education. A really amazing resource for parents.
Devops in Practice: How They Do It
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010Damon Edwards (DTO Solutions) & John Willis (Opscode) are the two guys really pumping out the “good news” of devops. They started a new podcast, Devops Cafe several weeks ago. Already on episode 8, having featured guests such as John Allspaw, R.I. Pienaar, Andrew Shafer, and more. Highly recommended.
Whats interesting is that John & Damon really aware of an outcry from the community, that is: “How do all these devops shops do it!!” We want to emulate them, know what tools they have, how they use them, what works, what doesn’t, etc. So to facilitate just that, they started a videocast sub-series called: Open Mic.
Open Mic 1: DevOps Metrics and Dashboards at Shopzilla from dev2ops.org on Vimeo.
In the first episode, they take us into Shopzilla, where Juan Paul Ramirez shows us their tools, metrics, and talks extensively about how they got to where they are. Excellent content!
If you haven’t already seen, perhaps the most popular talk this year at Velocity, “A Day in the Life of Facebook”, in which the Facebook Ops team introduces us to their tools and organization.
Whats really great here is that we’re not share deeper information about how we’re doing things, such that we can be a community of organizations. In the past, only a handful would really share and they were always far removed from useful pratice. I really hope this trend continues.
Big thanks to John and Damon for helping fuel that fire!
OGB Threatens to Shoot Itself In The Head
Monday, July 12th, 2010This morning, at the 8AM (Pacific) OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) meeting, the following was proposed and unanimously resolved:
The OGB is keen to promote the uptake and open development of OpenSolaris and to work on behalf of the community with Oracle, as such the OGB needs Oracle to appoint a liaison by August 16, 2010, who has the the authority to talk about the future of OpenSolaris and its interaction with the OpenSolaris community otherwise the OGB will take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.
That is to say, “start talking to us or we’ll just shot ourselves in the head.”
I made my opinion very clear via the IRC back-channel during the call. At least my call for a liaison was added into the resolution, but I am extremely opposed to this cowardly act.
What exactly do we have to gain or Oracle to loose? All Oracle does is runs out the clock, the entire OGB resigns, and then the one little bit of control the community has is gone. What motive, other than a benevolent act to garner press attention, does Oracle have to comply? We’ve just made their job easier.
I once advocated this kind of self-implosion tactic back in the Sun days. The reason was to re-organize the OpenSolaris leadership to be more engaged and industry focused. That was a good idea back in the days when I had faith that Sun would “do the right thing”. However, those times have past. Oracle has made it clear that it either controls things or it doesn’t… there is no give and take. I don’t think we can demolish the structure and believe that Oracle will re-organize in such a way as to give the community more power. It was a long shot with Sun anyway.
Frankly, imho, this is just the OGB throwing its hands in the air. The body has been useless for a long time, but only because it has chosen to be. The majority of the OGB’s life its wasted by trying to restrict its own authority by endlessly debating and re-writting the constitution. Its never lead anything, and it isn’t now.
But the fact that its a wet rag doesn’t mean we should simply throw in the towel. A weak seat of power is better than no seat at the table.
So where do we go from here? Who knows. At this point the die is cast and OGB is putting up their last stand. Maybe Oracle gets serious and does something, but I really doubt it. Not because they can’t, but because its not in their best interest. Why kill something intent on killing itself.
My only concern as this point is to not loose regular code updates and access to the bug database. Yes, the existing code is “out there”, but Oracle is still the biggest contributor, 99.999 to 1. Anyone can fork at any time right now, as is, so if your going to do that why would you risk cutting off the huge contributions continuously made by Oracle?
We’re in no worse a position right now than we were during the Sun days. They didn’t communicate, we had no visibility or impact on the OpenSolaris distribution, etc. Don’t fall into the lie that things are now “worse” than they were… they aren’t. Its status quo. The difference is that the OGB is no longer composed of Sun insiders who can get a sense of control from hallway conversations and are now as blind and weak as those of us in the community always have been.
The request for a liaison is a good one… I support it. But damnit, put the gun down. We don’t need to act like irrational children having a tantrum. Ultimatums rarely workout the way you hope.
The bar is lower than the original resolution was, so we’ll hope for the best and see.
UPDATE: OGB Member Peter Tribble has written a blog entry about this action, recommended reading. While I disagree with the action, Peter is a great guy whom I greatly respect.
Planet Solaris Dies the Death
Thursday, July 8th, 2010A very sad day indeed… Planet Solaris is dead. Just another in a long line of bad signs. Please use Planet.OpenSolaris.org instead. A big thanks to David Edmondson for running planetsolaris.org for so long.
I am partly responsible. Sorry to everyone that the blog has been so quiet lately. Given that state of Solaris right now, its unclear what is dead and what is alive. It feels futile to blog about features that may never really be viable. Couple that with OpenSolaris which still hasn’t delivered and the fact that many of the features that need documenting are really pretty uninteresting to me (ie: IPS/AI).
The exodus still continues. Lots of engineers have left Sun and many more are considering leaving. I’m told by folks that its not a huge problem because while the big name guys are leaving, the real down in the trench do-ers are still there and working away. But it certainly is disheartening.
The most recent news out there was that Oracle yanked HP’s OEM License, so if you run Solaris on HP Prolient servers, your hosed. See? Not a lot of positive stuff for me to blog about.
Personally, I’ve been more interested recently with the growing ‘Devops’ movement and IT standards. I’ve spent a lot of time in ITILv3, ISO 20K/27K, CobiT 4.1, COSO, NIST SP800-53, etc, etc, etc. A whole new and interesting world to me because I came to it instead of a company hoisting it on me against my will.
I have several articles to get out for SearchDataCenter which I’ll plug here, and then will start rolling new content out here in a bit.
