Further research into ITIL

I'm still trying to figure out whether ITIL really makes sense, either in terms of usage or marketing. I went to a local itSMF meeting yesterday, and I would say it was inconclusive. It was clearly very guideline-oriented, rather than action-oriented, which makes it tougher to tell whether it's directly useful.

Charlie Schluting also sent me a link to an article on ITIL that he wrote, and he's pretty convincing that I should at least be looking at it and talking to my customers about it. It sounds like it'd initially be most useful to those who don't currently have good process, but I'll do my best to spend some time on it trying to sync terminology, because that's certainly one area where sysadmins could use some help.

Fri, 25 May 2007 | Tags: sysadmin, itil, process

LISA 2006

I'm now at LISA in DC, back from FOSS.in and India. I only got a couple of days home before I headed here, and it's taken some time to adjust. I somehow managed to travel for 33 hours last Wednesday (from 2:30am in Bangalore until 11:30pm in Nashville, which is 11.5 hours later than Bangalore's).

We had two configuration management workshops this year; I chaired the first one with Narayan Desai of Argonne Nat'l Labs, which was theoretically focused more on tools and practice, and Paul Anderson and Sanjai Narain chaired the second one, which focused on configuration validation, most of it around network configurations rather than systems.

One of the best parts of the conference so far has been that Cory Doctorow did the keynote, and he's already blogged about the best paper this year, which is about protecting your RFIDs from unauthorized access.

The rest of the conference, for me, is going to different talks, hopefully learning a bit but usually half listening and half hacking and surfing in the back of the room.

I am also now confirmed at LinuxConf Australia in January, so I've got yet more travel lined up already.

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 | Tags: sysadmin, industry, travel

Carr on Bray on Carr

I read a vast number of blogs on Bloglines (you can check my blogroll, if you want); a lot of it (like a lot of everything) is a waste, but it's a good way to keep up on what's going on in the blog world (which isn't much like what's actually going on in the world).

One of the many tech talk blogs I read is Nick Carr's Rough Type blog. I'd say that overall he's one of the better commentators, in that I am seldom pissed that I happened to run across his articles (bye bye TechCrunch) and I am often at least somewhat enlightened by them. Thus I was surprised to read some other blogs castigating Nick.

Just the other day, Tim Bray commented on Nick, and I was again somewhat struck that Tim thought so little of Nick, since I think they're both good commentators. So, I was happy to see Nick's response, and a great response it was:

It's even worse, if more understandable, in the technology sphere, where newness is all. If you spend a lot of time following contemporary discussions of computer technology and its consequences - in the blogosphere, say - you may find yourself convinced that the universe came into being in 1990, fashioned by the almighty hand of Tim Berners-Lee. There's no past at all, just the illusion that what we're experiencing has never happened before and, in some odd way, counters everything that's happened before. Even the search engines we use to organize all the so-called knowledge that has migrated onto the Net are designed to discount the past, to assign a positive value to newness and a negative value to oldness. The hegemony of the recent is inscribed in the very algorithms through which we, increasingly and perhaps tragically, make sense of the world. Given how overbalanced our discourse is toward the new, I feel it's the least I can do to place my thumb on the other side of the scale.

He succinctly captures the frothy nature of the online world -- "it's new, and thus axiomatically better!". Well, ok, maybe not "succinctly", but well. This is especially the case in the new "Web 2.0" world, where suddenly nothing is interesting unless it's Web 2.0, which by definition means that if it's older than 5 or so years old, it's not interesting.

Yay for Nick for standing up for historical perspective. Sometimes I have to read a book that involves actual history just to remind myself that the world has always had froth, it's just the nature of the froth that changes.

Fri, 11 Aug 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

Renaming Configuration Management

I started a thread on the seldom-used LOPSA Configuration Management mailing list today.

For those of you not on the list, it's a thread worth looking into.

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 | Tags: naming, config-mgmt, sysadmin

An Open Letter to Tim Bray about OSCON

Hi Tim,

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet you at OSCON; I've been following your blog for a while and it's been a treat.

I'm writing to compare your experience at OSCON to my experience.

Interestingly, both you and I were added to the schedule at the last minute, but for very different reasons.

The submissions board did not think my talk was interesting or appropriate, largely it seems because it was about operations. Tim O'Reilly blogged about how cool Microsoft's operations are, though, paying particular attention to how important the topic is these days, and my (relatively bitchy) comment on his post led to Nat offering to let me fill in a slot opened up through a cancellation. I expect that my proposal was worded horribly, which likely had something to do with the rejection (I had no idea how to phrase the abstract or talk so it would be appropriate, because I had little knowledge of the attendees) but it was one of very few talks on operations and the only one on automation other than Capistrano, which is Rails-specific.

Your talk, on the other hand, seems to have been accepted at the last minute because you were able to email Nat directly and he clearly knows you, and because the topic is very Web 2.0. I expect that you could have gotten a slot on about any topic, but your proposal discussing Atom seems like it was a shoo-in given the people choosing slots. I might be getting the wrong impression about how you got your speaking slot, but your post implies it took only a few words from you to Nat.

This is relevant because I think it leads directly to our divergent perspectives on OSCON. I thought it was the most insular conference I've ever attended; every party was invitation-only, and invitations were not exactly trivial to come by. Well connected people got even better connected, and poorly connected people (such as myself; I'm well-connected in the systems world, but apparently not in the O'Reilly world) stayed poorly connected.

If part of OSCON were converted to a foo-style camp, then it would in fact be foo-style; that is, only friends of O'Reilly would be invited. This would just increase the insularity of the conference. There is a very good reason why people have created bar camps -- we live in an open culture, and it's not right that there be gatekeepers to the culture. Tim O'Reilly clearly has the right to do whatever he wants in his own camps and conferences, and he's done a great job of meeting and connecting a lot of great people, but it should be obvious that the open source world prefers open processes and open conferences.

And don't think that I was the only person who noticed or commented on the conference's insularity -- it came up quite often at the tables in the hall, which is where I spent a significant portion of the conference.

I, too, was disappointed with the content in the conference, but I do not think the solution is to let the luminaries speak and everyone else listen. I think it should take a bit more of a page from science -- peer reviewed talks would be a great way to judge both interest and quality. I can only assume that OSCON's acceptance board is as insular as the rest of the conference, and it likely had a large impact on the conference.

Really, though, I think the conference just lacks a purpose -- is it to enable better OSS software? Bring developers and users together for networking? Inform developers and users? Help build business around OSS? Or just to talk about anything and everything related to OSS?

I think not having a clear purpose resulted in a conference that didn't do its job very well. The greats got to talk and they did great, because that's why they're famous, after all. There were no good mechanisms for choosing the not-greats, so it was pretty random as to whether something good got chosen.

Why is it that a conference organized entirely around openness is so closed in its production and experience? I cannot find any detail about the organization of the conference beyond Nat and Tim. Compare that to USENIX's LISA organizer's page -- it doesn't show all of the paper reviewers, but this is everyone involved in decision-making, anyway.

I feel a bit like an ingrate, because I was provided an opportunity to present, after all, but the whole thing was a strange enough experience that I don't think I can skip the commentary.

Is it time to create an Open Source conference that's created in the same way that Open Source is created?

(I'm sorry this is so long, but I didn't have time to make it shorter.)

Mon, 31 Jul 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

Returning from OSCON

I'm sitting in PDX (yay for free wifi!) ready to finish off my trip to OSCON, with a couple of bottles of Oregon Pinot Noir in my carry-on (mmm).

Overall I was somewhat disappointed in the content of the conference. It must have at least something to do with incorrect expectations, but I expected a lot more technical, process-oriented talks. There were a lot of talks about specific technologies, but relatively few high-level talks and surprisingly few that I was interested in.

The hallways track was overall very good, although a bit more insular than LISA usually is, I think. I spent a lot of time hanging out with John Lam, which was very interesting -- he lives entirely in the Microsoft world, but is a heavy Ruby user. Very smart, lives in Toronto, and loves Ruby -- what's not to like?

There also seems to have been a huge uptick in attention to Puppet this past week, and I can only think that it's because of OSCON. I've got a lot of emails to respond to, but I've been working on some interesting stuff in the last week.

No rest for the wicked; see you all on the flip side!

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

OSCON presentation

I'm sitting at OSCON trying to rework my presentation for this audience, and it's about as difficult as I expected.

I don't yet have a feel for the audience. I'm somewhat surprised how few people seem to be developers of open source software, and instead it seems somewhat like a conference for OSS users, which is not at all what I expected.

I'm definitely still tainted from the Web 2.0 conference last year; I keep wanting to make snide jokes about the froth that surrounded the conference, and I'm still pretty bitter how much attention web companies with no business model get when infrastructure companies with a pretty good model just get ignored.

So, I decided to attend Doc Searls's tutorial on Marketing to People Who Hate Marketing, and I'm getting Web 2.0 flashbacks. He warned us in the beginning that he didn't know how to create a 3.5 hour tutorial, and now I believe him. It's true that he's speaking a bit about marketing, but he's much more focused on describing to us what he thinks the new market is, rather than teaching us how to speak to it, or create a new one, or whatever. Yes, blogs and podcasts and flickr are all the shiznit, but is this really the only way to look at the world?

Or if it is the only way to look at the world, then can't it be talked about in a way that seems less like religious froth and more like analysis of some kind? I don't like being preached to about anything, much less blogs and podcasts by someone made famous by blogs and podcasts.

I think the sessions are a good bit less Web 2.0 froth, and most of the people I've spoken to weren't all frothy, so I expect that this is an exception not the rule at OSCON.

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

Managing Solaris Zones

I almost named this article "Automating Solaris Zones", but I realized that there are already sites that talk about that, and this is somewhat different.

First, what are Solaris zones? Well, they're somewhere betwen full virtual machines and chroot jails, and (this is kinda the cool part) you get to basically move the slider toward one or the other. If you want, you can build a zone that has almost no per-zone data, reusing /usr, /lib, /sbin, and anything else from the global zone (yes, that's the offical name), with all of it read-only. Or, you can reuse nothing, and have a clean zone where everything is read-write. Any zones always share the kernel, init process, and the service manager with the global zone, though, which is one big difference between zones and VMs -- there's only one kernel, no matter how many zones you have. This sets a limitation on zones, in that they will never be able to be moved while running to a new machine, because the kernel isn't virtualized.

I still don't completely understand them yet -- they seem to do some package shenanigans that I don't get (e.g., when installing a package in a global zone, you get messages that imply that it's being installed in all other zones, even though there's no "install packages in all zones" command). In looking at the man page for pkgadd (I can't seem to find a recent copy online), this information is apparently handled in the package database, and can even be manipulated by individual packages, which is pretty weird.

So anyway, we're talking about managing zones, not automating them. What's the difference? There really isn't one, since neither of these has a clear definition, but the word "manage" seems to be more encompassing than "automate", and all of the zone automation I've seen so far has been pretty simple -- create a zone.

Puppet can do quite a bit more than that already. Particularly, you can specify the directories that the zone should inherit, you can configure the ip addresses for the zone, and you can specify the state that the zone should be in (e.g., configured, installed, running, absent):

zone { myzone:
    inherit => ["/usr", "/sbin", "/platform", "/lib"],
    ip => "e1000g0:192.168.0.101",
    ensure => running
}

You can see I had to do some skullduggery there -- the IP field is complex, which I do not like at all but do not see a good way around. I'm going to have to address this better when I look at managing local filesystems, since they have three fields, and it's really quite unacceptable to use that kind of mechanism at all, much less for three fields.

But the real point is, this will create a zone for you. And if you change list of ip addresses or inherited directores, puppet will change the zone's configuration. Alternatively, if you want to move a zone from running to just installed, Puppet will do that for you, too.

Heck, say you don't care about any of this, but you're messing around with zones on Solaris and you're wondering what the fastest way to create a simple zone is; welcome to the one-liner:

puppet -d -e 'zone { myzone: ensure => running }'

This won't get any inherited directories or any network addresses, but you can always add them later:

puppet -d -e ' zone { myzone: ensure => running, inherit => ["/usr", "/sbin"] }'

Yes, that will modify the configuration of your existing zone, not try to create a new one or any some such.

I put the '-d' in there because some of these commands (well, the "install" command) take a long time to run, and debugging prints the commands being executed, so you don't think Puppet has hung or something. Not a problem with non-interactive code, but for interactive stuff it can be confusing.

This is in the main branch of the subversion trunk, and will hopefully be released this week.

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

Exchanging the MacBook

Today was my last day to decide whether to return the MacBook or not (and pay a 10% restocking fee), so earlier this week I called Apple and told them that when it was plugged in but entirely idle, the CPU would sit at 66C, and that it would go up to 88C when I was actually doing anything.

They surprisingly decided that was bad, so they are exchanging it for a new one. I'd like to say that that makes me happy, except that I don't have a lot of hope that the new one will be much better -- my wife's MacBook Pro is the version that's supposed to be the "good" one, but it also gets insanely hot and has the infamous processor whine (which mine had a touch but not as badly as hers).

So, I had to take the 2GB of Crucial RAM out of it and put the 512MB back in. I upped it because workspace switching was pretty darn slow and I wanted to see if that would make a difference. Somewhat disappointingly, it did -- it's sad to see 512MB of RAM not be sufficient for a machine. It's good that it became faster, but it still wasn't fast enough when I had an external LCD hooked up -- that workspace switching was still quite slow, especially when compared to my Debian box which is theoretically slower (dual athlon from 2-3 years ago). Even if my Debian box is hammered it still switches almost instantaneously.

Anyway, so I'm reinstalling the 512MB of RAM, and while I'm very appreciative that the RAM (and the hard drive, which I will likely up to a 100GB 7200rpm drive) is easy to install, it's not a very good system. You can't see the housing for the RAM, so you can't tell if it's actually seated. The docs say just to press with two fingers, but... I reinstalled the RAM four times, and only on the last attempt did I get it installed right. I had to use a cloth napkin to protect my fingers from the thin ram chip and press with both hands, one on the chip and one on the far side of the laptop. One of the chips slid in crooked but clearly further than mere "pressing" had pushed it before, so after some more shoving I finally got the RAM chips all the way in. I remember it being annoying when installing the 2GB, but not this annoying.

Oh, and the only indication that the RAM was installed incorrectly was that the sleep light would pulsate without the machine turning on. I miss the old glass breaking noise, but I'm at least surprised the docs don't mention how to tell when that's the problem (not that it shouldn't be obvious, but what if I had installed both RAM and HD?).

So the lesson is, you really have to shove that RAM into the MacBooks. If the RAM and the edge of the casing are level, then the RAM isn't in far enough -- it was 1-2mm further back than the casing when I was done, with an obvious overhang.

Hopefully I'll have my new MacBook next week, but as long as I get it before I fly to California for a Joyent on-site, I'll be fine.

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

MacBook -- ouch!

So I picked up a MacBook last night to replace my 12" powerbook, which is nearly three years old. The form factor was basically what I was looking for in a replacement, although it's a solid pound heavier than I was hoping. The battery life is decent so far, but it seems like the machine is faster than the OS X kernel's ability to handle it. Single applications are sometimes plenty fast (when the hell is Firefox going to create a new thread for every tab? Hello?), but switching between applications still seems to take forever. If I keep the machine I'm going to fill it with 2GB of RAM, which should help some, but OS X seems particularly vulnerable to I/O -- I've noticed that if I'm doing anything there, it just grinds to a halt, and I'm usually lucky to even get the spinning beach ball -- often, it just doesn't do anything for a while.

But the biggest summary of the box is "ouch!", since it's been averaging above 70C since I started getting it built this morning (you can use CoreDuoTemp to get temps on these and MacBook Pros -- and speaking of application switching, I use VirtueDesktops, and while running Software Update and switching from my X11 desktop to Firefox, doing a google search, copying the first link, and switching back took about one full minute, nearly all of it sitting and waiting for Firefox or X11 to recover and let me interact with them).

That's just way too hot. I don't know what to do about it; it's obvious that Apple considers it acceptable if your machine burns your lap. I'm thinking of checking out the thermal paste on the box (and potentially voiding my warranty, I guess), but if that's not the problem I don't want to be stuck with a machine that I can barely use -- and this machine's primary use is for my lap when flying or working on my couch or whatever.

Grr. Silent is great, but not when it's at the cost of usability.

And speaking of silent, my fan is on this weird kick where is just speeds up and down constantly, instead of staying at a constant hum. Oh well.

I do like the form factor, other than how sharp the front edge of the palm rest is and how wide the bezel around the screen is.

Sat, 20 May 2006 | Tags: sysadmin

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