Sysadmin

Saw this today and I think it’s the secret to being a kick ass sysadmin:

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.—A.E.

When you need a tool you reach for one of these, right?

Why not? It has everything those other tools out there have. Isn’t this the same tool you see all mechanics using? You use one of these for opening bottles of wine, right? Got one of these handy for when you need to hang a picture? Or cut down a tree?

This seems really absurd looking at the picture and thinking about doing any of those tasks so why is it such a hard concept for some to grasp when we put it in abstract terms related to IT? I overheard a debate about what was better: using multiple “best in breed” technologies from different sources or using a single solution that does those tasks to some degree. Sure, from an IT administration perspective it’s easier to just support one broad solution. Sounds appealing.

But is that what’s really best for your users? Think about forcing your graphic designers to use Windows instead of Mac. Or making your sales people use Linux. You only want to support just one OS and the one you picked does everything the others do, right?

Use the right tool for the job at hand. You’ll find it was worth the extra trip to the hardware store.

Lenovo is running one hell of a deal on laptops right now. They’ve got 25% off for their anniversary sale and dealnews.com has a coupon that stacks another 10% off on that. I’ve been using an old T40 with Fedora on it a lot recently and it rocks. They had me sold until I tried to customize the ThinkPad I wanted. Sure enough, you can pick 5 flavors of Windows but you HAVE to pick one. I don’t want Windows and I don’t want to pay a Micro$oft tax no matter how small the amount. So… NO SALE.

Screw it, I’m back to waiting for Leopard to come out and I’m going to go buy a new Mac.

If not already in your toolbox, xargs should be:

read items from the standard input, delimited by blanks (which can be protected with double or single quotes or a backslash) or newlines, and executes the command (default is /bin/echo) one or more times with any initial- arguments followed by items read from standard input. Blank lines on the standard input are ignored.

We now have over 100 blogs at your finger tips on Planet Sysadmin (actually 110 at last count). Thanks to all of the all of you who have sent in great suggestions of feeds to add. Keep them coming! I hope this is generating traffic for all of you sysadmin bloggers out there.

We’ve also had about 600 absolute unique visitors to the planet page from 58 different countries in the last month according to GA. 45% of visits are returning visits. And all of that is not counting people only subscribed to the rss feed.

MySQL replication is pretty good. It’s easy to set up and fairly robust. There’s two things keeping it from being really awesome – you have a master and a slave. That means applications need to know which server to write to (the master) and if the master fails there is no automatic fail over to the slave for writes. Usually that means some manual work. Sure, you could get into clustering but what about a multi-master setup instead?

Ah, the problem there is how do you handle auto increments which can and will collide. There’s a trick to it described by an advanced replication article on onlamp.com: use auto_increment_increment and auto_increment_offset to force non-conflicting values on each server. Add a little circular replication, front end the server pool with your dns/load balancing trick of choice and profit!