Crunch Tools

Recently, I listened to an O'Reilly webcast called "The Myths of Innovation" where Scott Berkun discussed the concept of a lab. He showed a picture of Edison's lab which showed wooden tables, lamps, and beakers. Systems administrators are also inventors.  We are required to script, program, and configure exotic servers and equipment. To discover new solutions, we need a lab. This is especially true with cloud computing and virtual infrastructure where machines are created and destroyed in a very transient manner.  You need a lab to track all of the successful and failed experiments.

Bootstrapping and rooting are two concepts often associated with computing, but not the documentation of computing environments. Sometimes concepts such as these are called design patterns and I would like to try and introduce a new pattern called Documentation Bootstrapping. I think this is a critical pattern for the creation of any successful and useful documentation.

Background Recently, I started a project at (www.eyemg.com) to migrate from VMWare to KVM. Our standard server deployment is based on RHEL5 running on HP DL380 hardware. Given our hardware/software deployment, it made sense to align ourselves with Red Hat’s offering of KVM. We are able to achieve feature parity with VMware server while adding [...]