Journal of a Sysadmin

Oh, and we did skating this week

It was only for a short time, because we live in a Nordic country where it’s hellish cold (frozen tundra?) we could only stay out for 10 or 15 minutes before our noses and toeses started to hurt. But we did get a picture of it too.

Calm before the storm

We all knew it was coming. It was looming over the city this morning so thick and pungent I had to document it.

There was a storm brewing at 9:00am when I shot this:

I could feel the city starting to wake up, have their coffee, make their lists and check opening times. I could hear the engines of a hundred thousand cars warming up and the squeak of shoppers sliding onto leather and vinyl seats in heated garages from Copperfield to Tuscany.

It was Christmas Eve morning.

Be damned if I was going to be stuck in that mess so Jonah and I headed out to the chiropractor early, did the one exchange I had to do and pick up food for the one day of the year not everything can be purchased at the local store.

This Christmas Eve morning is slightly different for our family because there are so many storms looming on the horizon. We are in unknown waters and each day brings new perils which fray nerves and leave everyone unsteady and on unsure ground. Counting Crows only touched on how long a Long December can be, in the end everything I’m sure will be alright but our lives may be more or less rich because of it and this Fall will have touched us in so many ways.

So Jonah and I did our last bits and headed home. By the time we returned to the South West of Calgary our city of a million people was starting to bounce with Christmas spirit. Some guy actually stopped traffic in the middle lane to let us pull out of the local grocery store. Traffic of course was picking up, two light waits already by 10:30am on Richmond Road and I’m guessing by 12:30pm when Jaime left work tensions would have started to get high and people would be moving into aggressive “Get the fuck off the street and let me get home” mode.

So much for Christmas spirit.

Later today we are doing Chinese from our favourite local place and I’m hoping to watch some movies after we wrap presents tonight. Tomorrow will be home cooked dinner and maybe some surprise skating if it’s warm enough and not -30C.

We almost took too long trying to get to where we wanted to go but made it through before the traffic was too crazy.

Now we are going to wait for mommy to come home, hang out on the couch and watch Bob the Builder, Mighty Machines or Dog the Bounty Hunter. Just the way Christmas Eve should be spent.

House vs Hammer, what is the house?

OK, it’s taken me less time to clue into this one then the “cloud computing” thing (wtf would have thought publishing an API for your online services would become a meme?).

Anyway to the point, what is the house? Perhaps the #first-house could be platform diversification, or maybe make that platform independence.

I’ve been in IT for a while now, and I always see the same thing: Vendor sells product, swears product is a one size fits all, product turns out to support one implementation of said protocol and that’s all.

Case in point, an unnamed by request organization purchases a product which the vendor states “supports LDAP”, unfortunately LDAP in this case only refers to Active Directory and not “LDAP” the open standard. Same vendor has vaporware which should “support linux and MacOSX as a web client” at some point in the future. Right, and they will support OpenLDAP and eDiirectory for their directory services too I bet. At least that’s what they will say to make the sale.

So what is the problem with this? It’s a free market so it should follow that the top product on the market is on top because it’s the best. Actually I believe the top of the market in the IT game is who can force themselves onto the most computers. Jobs products might be the next one on the top but I don’t know if that will change anything, Apple too has shareholders, and I don’t personally know him…

I’ve also been a FOSS advocate for a while now and the reason sometimes gets lost in the argument. If I use OSS I get the advantage of being able to open the wall of the house, fix the wiring and then contact the contractor to provide feedback on a better house the next time around. I can’t do that with close source. I’m not only a systems administrator and a programmer, but I’m also a troubleshooter. I need the ability to see what the product is doing to determine what the problem is. I also don’t want to be taken to court because I am caught tracing a program or sniffing a network packet… That’s an entirely different threat on the same subject though.

Back on the subject of platform independance, there’s the client side as well which is even more important to us as developers, maintainers, and administrators. If your goal is uptake of a service (and who would not want that) you can’t force your clients to use a service and require that they use a specific browser or client. Web is definitely the way and I think building platform independence is where people need to concentrate on before pushing forward.

What about technicians using iPhones or iPod Touches as the web client using safari and with Fring installed to leaverage your budding VOIP services which are SIP compliant. Tech support reps can go to the desktop, update tickets, close calls, and never have to come back to the office to update and get the next ticket. It’s 2008 after all, not 1998.

The house has to be open. Open standards, open source, open products.

So from my customer service POV that’s where I see it. I also see other far more impacting applications of this rule.

Cloud computing, pushing your data to the net and having the net feed you back what you want filtered out (in a rough overview-esq 1000 mile out kind of view).

Imagine if you put your data in but it’s now locked up in that vendor. Current contracts may lock you into that vendor and this makes your data immobile. In theory your vendor could raise their fees and you would have little to no choice in the matter.

Imagine you put your data in then the service breaks. So what if you have an SLA with the vendor and that the vendor has promised free service until the end of time, it’s your data, live data, data that has changed since you stored it and now it’s unavailable. If you ever need to have an open solution that has to be it.

Your SLA has to include an clause which allows you open access to your data at any time. Ultimately this does not have to include open source software but frankly I’d be hard pressed to put my data into something that I’ve never seen the source code to. Of course on a day to day basis companies trust all kinds of data to all kinds of software. I’ve never seen the source to Oracle but at least I know who manages the firewall and I know the security on the box because I manage it. I have a reasonable level of trust in the security of that data.

Then we start to run into secure computing, the security of that data which you push into the cloud which you hope is manged by open standards and hasn’t locked you into a specific vendor.

When web services meet cloud computing meet secure computing. OK, I can see this snowballing out of control.

The subject is huge and I can go on all day about it but I’m on vacation and have people to meet and errands to run in the physical world. =)

I just want to close by saying that before we rush headlong into the implementation I think there is a lot to be said for reviewing what we have, where we have been and out of that create a rough trail of where we want to end up.

House cleaning while the birds tweet

Two impressive moves for me today:

• I’ve obviously changed my journal theme, it’s only been the same for the past 5 years.
• I’ve signed up for a twitter account and am actually trying to use it, is it useful?

So, #1 was easy. I had to upgrade WP today anyway on 4 different journals (which took all of 5 minutes) and wanted to find a new theme so there you go. Hey, who’da thunk I could change…

#2 is odd. I’m trying to see if it’s going to add any additional value beyond following Jaime’s tweets. So far I’ve observed that the people who are at the top (timoreilly and timbray for example) are actually spouting useful stuff, for the most part and it makes you stop and think. This is good.

gtrend is actually kind of neat. Funny how the collective gravitates from one thing to the next in an amoeba like fashion, so I’m following that one if for nothing else entertainment.

I think though I see one bad thing about twitter, besides the entire time hole continuum thing: Twitter needs authentication, I can easily foresee a fake IDC tweet messing with the markets like the Apple/Jobs heart attack thing.

What I envision for twitter would be a simple to use (read automatically generated, uploaded, and managed) GnuPG pub/priv key signature to send each tweet into twitter. The signed messages would then be verifiable as being from the actual person. Maintaining a key ring with signed keys and a return key signing parties or even better, meetings where you share keys at the end along with your business cards (oh, my GnuPG finger print is on the back of the card so you can verify my tweets)?

Mind you, anyone running an insecure computing platform will not be verifiable because if you give me time and you use the machine I’ll control your actions. Also the nature of people is to give up information in the guise of being “helpful”, compromising their accounts in the process (at least 1% of receivers of a mail phishing attempt will divulge their account information). Of course on a scale of magnitude Aunt Bessie may give up information to phishers but her tweets won’t cause the apple stock to plummet but IDC authorized tweeters would know better and would know to not allow access to their private keys.

As it stands now we don’t know if that really is timoreilly or one of his staff (from reading some of his work though I’m thinking it may actually be him. If he doesn’t tweet for more then say, 12 hours can we say he’s dead?). Naturally having never met Tim (Mr. O’Reilly?) and likely I never will can I ever actually verify his GnuPG key except to download his pub key from a specific location?

Well, I put the new idea out. Maybe I’ll do something about it tomorrow.

Tags: GnuPG, O'Reilly, Twitter, wordpress theme

5km run, a little bike and a little abs

37 minutes total.

5km run was 25m 10s which would be great to carry out to 10km, but on the track 10km might really suck.

Run home and back to work

Only took 18:30 to do and is a total of 3.57km from work to home and back at lunch. Walked the dog when I was here…

5.3km run

Ok, really I’m going to try to remember to log all the workouts here.

Today, 5.3km run. Path was from the rec entrance, north then east to Richard road, north on Crowchild to Richmond Road, west to 29th St., south to Richardson Way then cut across the parking lot and over to the top-centre of the amphitheatre above the pond. Total time 27:02 including stopping for a traffic light.

Grass Man!

The one thing I have never really liked about our house was the backyard. It was always so small and the deck looked kind of off, having a second level which was too small to really do much with. I’ve always wanted to do a brick patio but never did anything about it until now!

It started in August with, “oh that won’t cost too much” and ended with 4.5 yards of sand and gravel, 6 yards of black dirt, grass, and shale removed, 12 yards of trash from the deck removal gone, 1700 Holland pavers, 2 bags of masons sand and 38 rolls of sod, a sore back and extremely rough hands.

I have to finish sod one corner and one edge along the patio and then do the railing on the deck and frame in under the deck and side it somehow (still not sure what we’ll do that in). It is rewarding to go into the backyard now and see such a change, we can’t wait till next summer so we can use it.

Updates and redundancy

Updated all of my hosts here and at the coloc.

Created a redundant LDAP server using slurpd replication.

iPhones and Upgrades

Had Friday and today off work as we were going dog camping on the weekend. That went well(ish) and today we had to go and do something about phones…

See, we wouldn’t have had to today really except that I had to wash Jaime’s with the HE washer. I guess it washes phones as well as it washes cloths, as it washed the good out of it. The phone is now only usable as a wedge type door stop (the razor is too small to use as a coaster).

Of course, as soon as her phone went missing my phone decided too completely croak so a good part of the day was spent digging around finding papers and deciding what phone and plan to get Jaime. We then proceeded to go to the Fido store and pickup a new Z310 for me (to replace the dead one) and an iPhone for Jaime…

All the hype I think is worth it. The phone seems solid and she’s posted to flickr, facebook, and now her journal. Mail works, we works and most importantly the phone actually works. Visual Voicemail btw is kind of cool, integrating the iPhone with voicemail so that you can navigate your voicemail from the phone menu instead of having to call it. Nice feature.

Data plans still suck here. Currently we are on the limited time offer $30 6G plan. Hopefully it goes down from that.

Tonight I upgraded all 4 installs of WP here. I’m happy to report that my diff and patch method still works!

Yay, it means 3 minutes instead of 15 per journal!.