SysAdmin
Within an ops team you should have 3 primary types of governance enablers: controls, policies and processes. A control is a guiding principle, which is implemented as a one or more policies (which are just rules), which are in turn standardized in a set of procedures. Its important to have all 3, because controls are very vague, policies are often general and broad in nature, which means to provide consistent quality results we require ...
I have lots of awesome CLI based reporting tools. One was so awesome that other people in the company wanted to get it on a regular basis but they preferred to see it as CSV so it could be manipulated in Numbers or Excel. Modifying my report to output CSV was easy, I just added a conditional that replace my pretty column formated printf() with an ugly comma separated printf(). Sending CSV in email is easy, just pump it into ''sendmail ...
Last week I was given the incredible opportunity to not only speak at LISA but to deliver the opening keynote. I hadn't expected to even go, but when I learned the topic was DevOps I made a last minute plea on the eve of the submission deadline for a slot to deliver a talk I was calling "The 60 Minute MBA", a history of Operations Management. My hope is that I could get some obscure timeslot so a handful of people could geek out with me on ...
Its here again, your favorite day of the year: SA Day. Several fun things to check out today, Matt has a good list of them in his blog today. From Cuddletech, have a good day watching YouTube videos and feeling good about yourself for once, put down the ticket queue and plan your next vacation, and drink some really good beer tonight. Here's a picture of Nova (my eldest daughter) on her first day as an SA, earlier this year, doing her ...
8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembra...
Cloud. DevOps. Both are in the fad category, but both are very popular and everyone is grasping at what they really are. There is a subtle difference however. "Cloud" is ambiguous, this leads to the never ending line of questions "What is Cloud?" and yet more as the concept evolves such as "If cloud means in the cloud, then isn't private cloud an oximoron?" DevOps on the other hand seems deceptively intuitive. This has caused ...
There are a lot of interesting SaaS offerings available today but not many that get me all excited. I recently blogged about Duo Security, they get me excited. Another of my favorites is Mint. The most recent has been PagerDuty. I met the PagerDuty team at Velocity & DevOps Days this week and they are a really awesome bunch of folks and so I thought I'd give them a little love to show my support. (This isn't sponsored, in all my ...
Smart Cards, OTP, Hardware Tokens like SecurID... 2 factor auth is an old standby and considered mandatory for any high security installation. But lets face facts, there are a myriad of problems involved. SecurID is complex and expensive and now has destroyed its credibility following the Lockheed break-in. Smart Cards are really sweet, especially solutions from ActivIdentity, but again its expensive and you have client hardware requirem...
When you go into the data center, either for rack'n'stack or maintenance, there are a couple of things that can make your life easier. You want to go light, of course, but also have everything you need so that your not going to have to post-pone work due to lack of gear. Common must-haves include: A very capable laptop. This is your primary tool. I prefer to 15" MacBook Pro, but whatever you use you'll want gigabit ethernet, wifi, ...
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.