Sys Admin

Weekend Reading: Scary Tales from the Server Room

Carlie Fairchild — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000

It's always better to learn from someone else's mistakes than from your own. This weekend we feature Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers as they tell stories from their years as systems administrators. It's a win-win: you get to learn from their experiences, and they get to make snide comments to each other.

It's Always DNS's Fault!

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

I was suffering, badly. We had just finished an all-night switch migration on our production Storage Area Network while I was hacking up a lung fighting walking pneumonia. Even though I did my part of the all-nighter from home, I was exhausted. So when my pager went off at 9am that morning, allowing me a mere four hours of sleep, I was treading dangerously close to zombie territory...

Zoning Out

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

Sometimes events and equipment conspire against you and your team to cause a problem. Occasionally, however, it's lack of understanding or foresight that can turn around and bite you. Unfortunately, this is a tale of where we failed to spot all the possible things that might go wrong.

Panic on the Streets of London

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

I was now at the next phase of troubleshooting: prayer. Somewhere around this time, I had my big breakthrough...

Unboxing Day

by Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers

As much as I love working with Linux and configuring software, one major part of being a sysadmin that always has appealed to me is working with actual hardware. There's something about working with tangible, physical servers that gives my job an extra dimension and grounds it from what might otherwise be a completely abstract job even further disconnected from reality. On top of all that, when you get a large shipment of servers, and you view the servers at your company as your servers, there is a similar anticipation and excitement when you open a server box as when you open Christmas presents at home. This story so happens to start during the Christmas season...

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Weekend Reading: Ansible

Shawn Powers — Sat, 05 Jan 2019 12:30:00 +0000

by Shawn Powers

I've written about and trained folks on various DevOps tools through the years, and although they're awesome, it's obvious that most of them are designed from the mind of a developer. There's nothing wrong with that, because approaching configuration management programmatically is the whole point. Still, it wasn't until I started playing with Ansible that I felt like it was something a sysadmin quickly would appreciate.

Part of that appreciation comes from the way Ansible communicates with its client computers—namely, via SSH. As sysadmins, you're all very familiar with connecting to computers via SSH, so right from the word "go", you have a better understanding of Ansible than the other alternatives.

With that in mind, I've written a few articles exploring how to take advantage of Ansible. It's a great system, but when I was first exposed to it, it wasn't clear how to start. It's not that the learning curve is steep. In fact, if anything, the problem was that I didn't really have that much to learn before starting to use Ansible, and that made it confusing. For example, if you don't have to install an agent program (Ansible doesn't have any software installed on the client computers), how do you start?

Ansible, Part I: the Automation Framework That Thinks Like a Sysadmin

How to get started with Ansible. Shawn tells us the reason Ansible was so difficult for him at first was because it's so flexible with how to configure the server/client relationship, he didn't know what he was supposed to do. The truth is that Ansible doesn't really care how you set up the SSH system; it will utilize whatever configuration you have. This article will get you set up.

Ansible, Part II: Making Things Happen

Finally, an automation framework that thinks like a sysadmin. Ansible, you're hired.

Ansible is supposed to make your job easier, so the first thing you need to learn is how to do familiar tasks. For most sysadmins, that means some simple command-line work. Ansible has a few quirks when it comes to command-line utilities, but it's worth learning the nuances, because it makes for a powerful system.

Ansible, Part III: Playbooks

Playbooks make Ansible even more powerful than before.

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New GeekGuide: Beyond Cron

Carlie Fairchild — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 16:45:10 +0000

by Carlie Fairchild

How to Know When You've Outgrown Cron Scheduling--and What to Do Next

If you've spent any time around UNIX, you've no doubt learned to use and appreciate cron, the ubiquitous job scheduler that comes with almost every version of UNIX that exists. Cron is simple and easy to use, and most important, it just works. It sure beats having to remember to run your backups by hand, for example.

But cron does have its limits. Today's enterprises are larger, more interdependent, and more interconnected than ever before, and cron just hasn't kept up. These days, virtual servers can spring into existence on demand. There are accounting jobs that have to run after billing jobs have completed, but before the backups run. And, there are enterprises that connect Web servers, databases, and file servers. These enterprises may be in one server room, or they may span several data centers.

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