| Fosdem 2009 |
[Jan. 17th, 2009|10:31 am] |
I finally got organinsed and booked going to FOSDEM, I didn't get there last year and am looking forward to it. Hopefully get a chance to catch up with some people.
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| A new entry into the state driven config management field |
[Jan. 16th, 2009|09:55 am] |
Whilst reading my daily blog roll I noticed that Ezra posted about a new configuration management tool chef and fact gatherer project ohai from the guys as opscode.
There is more details on the wiki, and I'm interested in finding out design differences to puppet and facter. An initial look at ohai looks good - JSON output of facts leads to clearer ability to collect nested facts than namespacing ipaddress_eth0.
chef looks to use ruby rather than an external dsl for it's cookbooks (recipes). |
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| Capturing the intent of system changes |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|08:52 pm] |
There has been some discussion on the puppet lists about potential language shortcomings, something lak said echoed with some thoughts I've been having recently:
No one starts with code, even when they think they do -- you always
start with intent. Why are you building this node? What services
should it offer? Why?
In Test Driven/Behaviour Driven Development projects I see intent and goal extensively within the language of the tests.
Time and again when I see setups with systems in a state where their configuration is divergent and it's impossible to tell what is the desired state (if you haven't heard of puppet - check it out) and why the change was needed.
Take for an example an organisation using NFS or Samba as a backend store for documents for a distributed workflow. Tweaks to the config (kernel parameters, mount options, config changes) may be apparent from the system or puppet, but it may not be clear the underlying value that you're trying to achieve. It may be throughput, reliability, access - systems changes are usually made for a specific reason - I'd like to be able to more easily capture that (preferably in the format of executable tests to validate) but make it easy for Jo, the Sysadmin, to easily do as change is driven out either in reaction to a situation or as part of a planned change. |
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| Systems Administration must die, die, die |
[Jun. 1st, 2008|03:06 pm] |
I really think that the term "Systems Administration" needs to go away. Use Systems Integrator, Systems Engineer (or Systems Reliability Engineer if you're Google) or some other term that more accurately represents the role.
I know there has been a lot of discussion about DSL's and Polyglot Programming around (eg http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2008/05/new-hope-polyglotism.html), but I know that good Systems Engineers regularly context switch between different DSLs (config file syntax, puppet) languages (shell, batch, sed, awk, perl, python, ruby, powershell).
From my own experience I might be debugging a core dumping application using gdb, then swapping puppet update something, followed by a dash of shell, a sprinkling of graphing in gnuplot (or gruff and ruby), then some Java. I don't think the word administration even comes close to explaining that.
I don't hear the term "Operator" in common usage for Systems Engineer, and I'd like to see Administrator go the same way. If you're recruiting for people think about the fact that words are powerful, think about the role and what it involves, then see if you feel that Administrator is the word you'd choose to fit that.
If you don't know what your friendly neighbourhood Systems Integrator does, ask her if she would mind you shadowing for a day, if you're developing you probably will learn a lot about how to write applications that are supportable just from understanding the pain points of debugging with just a log file! |
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| Tool of the day |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|05:43 pm] |
I was looking for something to simulate delay and latency on linux using netfilter or iptables and discovered Netem and the wonderful lagfactory script that did just what I wanted. |
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| Puppet and ctags |
[Feb. 11th, 2008|09:01 pm] |
Whilst finding my way around puppet, I realised that some of the tools I'm used to when developing in other languages weren't quite there.
A quick read through the ctags documentation and I knocked up a couple of simple regular expressions that enable me to quick navigate through a large, split out puppet configuration using vim. Adding the following to ~/.ctags will enable you to run ctags -R at the top of your puppet manifests and navigate through tags. I'll probably need to actually go through the language definition and ctags docs some more to provide more comprehensive functionality but this works for me right now so I wanted to share it.
--langdef=puppet
--langmap=puppet:.pp
--regex-puppet=/^class[ \t]*([:a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
--regex-puppet=/^site[ \t]*([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
--regex-puppet=/^node[ \t]*([a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
--regex-puppet=/^define[ \t]*([:a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+)[ \t]*/\1/d,definition/
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| Virtualisation libraries |
[Feb. 4th, 2008|10:06 am] |
Whilst looking into the progress of libvirt and use with VMWare and OS X, I discovered ivi which is a java library around VMWare, Xen, KVM and OpenVZ. Hopefully VMWare in libvirt won't be far off. |
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| Yaboot update |
[Jan. 4th, 2008|01:19 pm] |
It's taken me some time since I moved in to the new place to setup my test environment again, it's not ideal as I don't have as much ppc hardware as I used to but it's a start. The morning was spent getting dhcp setup, and ensuring neboot worked end to end with the iBook. Once that was done I could test yaboot git HEAD using netboot.
Some of the recent features are really useful, I love being able to netboot to test the netboot code, then do
device=hd partition=2 filename=yaboot.conf
To boot off the hard disk. The use of the initrd= to load an alternate initrd from the command line is an improvement I've wanted for a long time and is great. It's also a good start to adding multiple initramfs images.
There is also the bootonce feature which I've not really played with in anger, as I tend to do most of my yaboot testing via netboot, which is even easier now we support larger images. |
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| yaboot |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|04:34 pm] |
yaboot 1.3.14 is released
http://yaboot.ozlabs.org/
Once my Fedora account is sorted I'll update there.
Many nice things for enterprise ppc users - bootonce, pSeries netbooting, user confs, pxelinux style netbooting. |
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| Time for a change |
[Aug. 17th, 2007|03:31 pm] |
After much consideration - I've decided to pursue other opportunities outside of Red Hat. My last day is today.
It's been a tough call, Red Hat have been a fantastic employer but it's time for me to do something different with my days.
I'm still looking forward to being active in Fedora, RPM, yaboot and other communities in my free time. |
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