Today, I got an email from the Fedora package manager, Red, who let me know that there was a problem with Petit. I don’t think he knew it, but it was actually my fault that the whole thing got screwed up, so I felt kind of bad. Well, to make a long story short, when
Tag: Best Practices
Systems Administrator’s Lab: Cacti Development
Background Today, I finally took the time to update a Cacti Data Query which I wrote a while back. When I took a look at it, I found out that it was never actually working for other people strait out of the box. This data query graphs BGP prefixes, messages received and messages sent. I
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Continue Reading “Systems Administrator’s Lab: Cacti Development”
Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part3
Background In Part 1, I described a method of documentation where the introduction of the system is made using the documentation. This builds consensus, enculturates an operations group, and provides a platform unto which more automation can be built. In Part 2, I elaborated on the ideas of Bootstrapping & Rooting, Self Service Culture, and
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Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 2
Background In Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 1, I laid out a blueprint for using documentation as the bootstrap for entry into an operations environment. In this article I will dig into the three main concepts mentioned in Part 1. In Part 3, I will demonstrate our use case for a data center of about
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Continue Reading “Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 2”
Uptime: Does it matter with the modern web service?
Last week Ksplice announced free no-reboot kernels for Fedora which sparked off some interesting conversation about uptime over at the Standalone Sysadmin. Honestly, I ran across Ksplice a while back and I thought to myself, huh that might be useful for a certain niche, I added to a wiki page that I use to track
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Continue Reading “Uptime: Does it matter with the modern web service?”
Bootstrapping and Rooting Documentation: Part 1
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.
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Scripting & Automation: The Qualitative to Quantitative Workflow
Background Scripting & Automation has been a goal since the beginning of Unix and, let me state, that I believe that it is possible to achieve a Fully Automated Provisioning system in our production environments. In fact, I think it is essential that we develop fully automated provisioning systems to keep up with the rate
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Introduction to DevOps
I will be giving an introduction to DevOps ((http://dev2ops.org/blog/2010/2/22/what-is-devops.html)) and the DevOps Toolchain ((http://code.google.com/p/devops-toolchain/wiki/DevOps)) at the Akron Linux Users Group (ALUG) ((http://groups.google.com/group/AkronLUG/web/alug-home-page)), held at the New Era Restaurant at 10 Massillon Rd. Akron Ohio (See map below) Often development and operations seem to have competing goals. Development is the gas, while operations is often perceived