Dormando's [crappy] Operations Mantras

Feb 03, 2008 22:23

Ops Mantras (as made popular by Dormando).
I've been doing this shit for a while now. I'm presently acting as a MySQL DBA for SixApart, but these views are mine and not of my employer. This is an omega post of all of the generalized one off mantras I find valuable when approaching operations management. Even if these end up being idealistic, my ( Read more... )

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Comments 14

teferi February 4 2008, 14:27:23 UTC
My company follows approximately *none* of these rules.

Sigh.

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price February 4 2008, 18:00:38 UTC
Really good post. I disagree with portions of your comments on forensics -- preserving the contents of volatile memory is one of the most important things to do when you log on to a potentially compromised system. Screwing around with cleaning up the obvious can trample evidence of less obvious nasties.

Actually, I guess I have a different take on security... Maybe I'll post something later that goes into my general ideas on security ops.

I'd love to see you throw up some posts (or just a shitload of links) on scalability and caching for the relative noob to get up to speed. You developed major skills in these areas out of necessity with the nature of the jobs you've had. The rest of us don't have that benefit ;)

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dormando February 4 2008, 18:06:00 UTC
Thanks!

Actually; my point was to insist on _not_ messing around cleaning up the obvious (unplug it, deal with it properly) during a real compromise. I'll clean up the language.

I could've probably posted a huge post just on security... the different levels of practicality and use. Hardly anyone ever gets it right, and I never get to run things as "secure" as I'd prefer.

Well, I think all of those sections could be expanded into huge piles of shit, but that was the point of keeping it to mantras instead of specifics.

I'll try to follow up with some links... unfortunately I don't know of many good ones! Most of this crap's rattling around my noggin.

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nice progress February 5 2008, 18:37:57 UTC
here's the deal: I am by no means as deep into the technical as you are. I exist comfortably on the front end, and I'm good at spotting things that can or should be improved.

But from a managerial standpoint, and I do know that I'm in the minority when I say that I have enough vocabulary in the subject to know what you're talking about, it's obvious that senior management anywhere is doing their company a grave disservice when they don't listen to the wisdom of experienced technologists.

Oh... and I'm glad to see that you STILL have the picture that i took of you in Long Beach as the only LJ icon of yourself.

LMAO
-N

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meonkeys February 5 2008, 22:23:17 UTC
Great post, Dormando.

Would you say a word or two more about your bias against SVN? I've always wanted to do more with a distributed version control system like git, but SVN seems like it has been good enough so far. I can almost always count on (a) internet access and I don't mind (b) a single central repository. The killer feature I feel is missing from SVN is merge tracking. But then again, I've never used git so I may just not know what I'm missing.

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meonkeys February 8 2008, 20:21:58 UTC
Sounds interesting and useful. SVK can do some of this, but it really feels cobbled on top of SVN. git sounds rad. Thanks!

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dormando February 7 2008, 04:32:56 UTC
Mostly what jkub said. I might write another post on distributed RCS since it's been the most popular question.

Give git a try. Or mercurial, whatever.

There're just a few primary reasons:

1) Go create a new branch in git. Come back when you're done peeing yourself.
2) Collaboration is fantastic. git pull? git-format-patch? I can go clone any git project, make 15 commits, update the patch series to work against the latest code (rebase, etc). Then send that as a nicely formatted, commit isolated, patch series. It's a completely different development style, and one I find promotes the best practices naturally.
3) Fast. Not just making branching/merging fast, but past a certain scale the concept of doing branching and merging SVN becomes impossible. I've passed this point in a few areas :)

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flex_fc February 6 2008, 09:03:50 UTC
Thanks for writing this, I will be passing it on to my colleagues here. Excellent article!

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dormando February 7 2008, 04:26:01 UTC
Thanks! :)

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