I like driving in my clown-car.
(This will be incoherent and likely contain swearing. I am still mostly running on snot and bile.)
There's a montage sequence in 'The first of the few' where RJ Mitchell is smoking a pipe at a problem and the fellows in the brown coats on the shop-floor are working on lathes and vices in order to build one or other of his fine seaplanes. However, there's some confusion over the routing of the oil-lines, so one of the engineer types has to beetle off to the design shop and ask Mr Mitchell about it. Yer man taps the drawings with his pipe, admits that it's not at all clear and promises to have a new design by the AM.
Nothing particularly strange going on there. A new thing is carefully considered over pipes and pints of mild, mock-ups are tested and drawings filled with well-specified terms are made up such that many examples of the new thing can be made without (by and large) the designer being on hand to personally oversee each one.
So I think it would be really quite nice if system administration could perhaps consider getting a clue and using tools and practices that have been with us since the industrial revolution.
There are no particularly good reasons for machines that are hand-built and/or infrastructures that lack DNS, SSO, central logging, patch-management, security management, trivially repeatable machine instantiation or useful reporting/instrumentation.
And yet. The attitude that such things are a bit hard or strange is part of the background noise.
For instance. Puppet's got the makings of quite a useful machine-management tool. However, one of the early types and/or examples was for login management by hand-hacking the passwd file and copying around SSH keys. Which, what?
I believe we've had working Kerberos + LDAP for the thick end of a decade, and yet people still think that keyed SSH access is pretty swish? Jayzus.
Still, I suppose it's not a set of shared root passwords of different classes, depending on machine type. No-one's daft enough to use that any more...
And. Why are people still surprised when disks fill up? I can see that some Java job going bugfuck and filling the /var partition (Oh, wait, we're all on fucking Linux now so it's all one big / partition. D'oh!) might be something of a black swan, but taking some readings and spotting a change in disk-usage delta isn't entirely rocket science.
And. Machine specification and swapfile sizing is still bloody voodoo.
There's a montage sequence in 'The first of the few' where RJ Mitchell is smoking a pipe at a problem and the fellows in the brown coats on the shop-floor are working on lathes and vices in order to build one or other of his fine seaplanes. However, there's some confusion over the routing of the oil-lines, so one of the engineer types has to beetle off to the design shop and ask Mr Mitchell about it. Yer man taps the drawings with his pipe, admits that it's not at all clear and promises to have a new design by the AM.
Nothing particularly strange going on there. A new thing is carefully considered over pipes and pints of mild, mock-ups are tested and drawings filled with well-specified terms are made up such that many examples of the new thing can be made without (by and large) the designer being on hand to personally oversee each one.
So I think it would be really quite nice if system administration could perhaps consider getting a clue and using tools and practices that have been with us since the industrial revolution.
There are no particularly good reasons for machines that are hand-built and/or infrastructures that lack DNS, SSO, central logging, patch-management, security management, trivially repeatable machine instantiation or useful reporting/instrumentation.
And yet. The attitude that such things are a bit hard or strange is part of the background noise.
For instance. Puppet's got the makings of quite a useful machine-management tool. However, one of the early types and/or examples was for login management by hand-hacking the passwd file and copying around SSH keys. Which, what?
I believe we've had working Kerberos + LDAP for the thick end of a decade, and yet people still think that keyed SSH access is pretty swish? Jayzus.
Still, I suppose it's not a set of shared root passwords of different classes, depending on machine type. No-one's daft enough to use that any more...
And. Why are people still surprised when disks fill up? I can see that some Java job going bugfuck and filling the /var partition (Oh, wait, we're all on fucking Linux now so it's all one big / partition. D'oh!) might be something of a black swan, but taking some readings and spotting a change in disk-usage delta isn't entirely rocket science.
And. Machine specification and swapfile sizing is still bloody voodoo.