Archive for August, 2009

Have you ever started writing a one-liner and half way in realized it was a bit more complex than you first thought?

If your shell is bash, next time that happens try ctrl-x ctrl-e.

It will take your current line and stuff it into the your default editor (export EDITOR=vim).

Ryan Nedeff posted a comment over on Matt Simmons blog about the Future of System Administrators. Mainly he was responding to a comment by Michael Halligan on twitter stating “I feel that any sysadmin today who isn’t learning Ruby and either Chef or Puppet will be unemployed in 5 years”.  Ryan brought up the debate of breadth of knowledge vs depth of knowledge. I think its a great discussion to have so lets have it.

Which side of the fence are you on?

Personally I go mainly for breadth of knowledge “jack of all trades master of none”. Knowing a little about a lot has served me well in the past. I do have specialized knowledge in an area or two like virtualization and clustering, but overall I consider myself a generalist (as long as its a Unix like system, I do try my best to stear clear of windows). Of course doing this I wont ever land a job as an Oracle DBA. But then again I don’t want to do the same thing all day long every day. What about you?

Also how do you think that decision will affect your earning potential in the short and long term?

I am so very tired of hearing about “the cloud”. Over lunch the other day a co-worker decided we should just call it the phog instead since the phog does a better job of describing exactly what is meant by the cloud.

Why is phog a better description? The phog has no defined shape, you can’t see clearly in it, its different everywhere you go, and once your in the middle of it you can’t find your way out (due to marketing fluf).

You cant have escaped all of the cloud stories in the past year or so. The one that just sent me over the edge was a press release about Vmware buying SpringSource. It is basically Vmwares approach to supplant Xen as the major phog platform. I’m not sure exactly what rubbed me wrong and sent me off into this tirade. Its very possible that I just don’t like Vmware and the first article I read used the more popular term for phog putting me in this tizzy. It’s also possible that I was already on edge about Vmware after my recent discussions with one of their sales people.

For a bit of background Vmwares sales goons are spreading the F.U.D. hard core. One sales goon recently told me “Xen is dead in the water”, “No one is using Xen”, “With all of Citrix’s advertising about Hyper-V  they don’t seem commited to the Xenserver product”. That along with “Everyone is going to KVM”, and some other slams about Xen not having dom0 support in mainline. Of course its fine that I don’t even have the option of running the Vmware hypervisor on the distribution of my choice, and no mention of the fact that dom0 support being mainline really has nothing to do with a Citrix products future. It’s not just a sales guy, I saw a similar slide against Citrix for their work with Hyper-V in a Vmware pdf (See bottom right corner). Anyway, on with the original rant.

As I was saying I was already on edge, and one more phog article shows up. What is the phog? Really? Its hosted applications, no more. Maybe a more programmatic way to define what services you would like and when you would like them available, but its nothing more than paying someone else to host your application servers.

This brings me to another point, and another thing that I wish developers would learn from system administrators (see my comment on Matt Simmons blog for context). Many of my developer friends think its perfectly fine to host everything on someone else’s equipment out in the phog. I feel it is one of my responsibilities to keep data safe. How can you keep data safe when its all out floating around in the phog. I have nothing against scaling out to the phog especially for high volume times but I still think that your core infrastructure should be managed on your own equipment where you can walk up to it and touch it if you want (even if its in someone else’s data-center).

I even had a conversation with a new co-worker recently who thinks everything, your data, downloaded content, desktop etc … will all move to the phog eventually. Ewwwww I can’t fathom letting my data slip that far from my hands.

Do you really think the phog will take off long term? What do you think about most of my developers friends points of view that putting _everything_ in the phog is acceptable or even a good idea?
~

Bryan William Anderson

8.2 lbs, 20.5 inches

1:25pm 8.5.209

Just a few hours old

Debian is departing (if ever so slightly) from the historical mantra “It ships when its ready”.

Looks as if Debian has decided time based freeze schedules will help them better manage time. Note they are not adopting time based releases, only the freeze is time based. I personally think this is a good thing. It will still ship when its ready but at least there will be some semblance of a time line for new releases. Thoughts?

Read the announcement here.