The press has been alight with the Oracle buying Sun Microsystems. Its a bit of a moment for me as I took some of my first steps as a Systems Administrator on sun hardware. I still remember fondly my first E220R machines and how cool those machines were. Neatly organised, well packaged and reassuringly expensive these machines epitomised a serious dot com attitude. You bought Sun if you could show you were going to have a lot of traffic. The unboxing of these machines was an almost religious experience. Those machines were grunty, when powered up they sounded like a purring Barry White... lovely. Solaris was the big boy of the UNIX world and along with Oracle they made a powerful combination. When compared to the Microsoft offerings of the time there was no mistaking the raw power. Even years afterwards I still recommended buying Sun hardware. You knew it was good kit, you knew it was well supported and if you needed more grunt you simply bought the next rung up the ladder. The ladder took you right the way up to mainframe class performance. Whatever happens now, another player from the old days of UNIX has fallen by the wayside.
The downside of that was Sun's approach - they charged like the proverbial wounded bull for all spares (the drives were a particular favourite of mine - a $1 metal tab and latch were enough to double the price of a hard disk); their insistence on trying to compete with Linux when it had become obvious to others that Solaris was dying; charging for their C compiler when GCC was free; buying MySQL and promptly seeing its founders up sticks and leave. When you write down the list of mistakes it starts to become monotonous... were we that well off? While re-reading The Art of UNIX Programming the second chapter reminded me of how bad things had been. The promise of UNIX that lay so un-fulfilled by Sun and the other big UNIX vendors was ubiquity. Changing vendors was excruciating, expensive and perilous as a project. If my list of Sun's mistakes is lengthy, the other players were as bad if not worse. For instance can anyone forget SCO and their crackpot legal theories?
So maybe this hastens the point at which open-source UNIX clones take their place at the top of the operating systems tree. I just hope we learn the lessons that Sun taught us.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Back to index cards
Over a range of projects that have been based around user stories, I have seen a number of different means of story management, including XPlanner, Mingle, spreadsheets, Pivotal Tracker and index cards. Each of these has good and bad points (some more than others), but I've come to regard index cards blue-tack'ed to the wall as the simplest and best option.
The major factor is visibility: regardless of what lanes you use, it is close to instant to view where each story is at and who is working on what. Compare this with logging onto your web-based story management tool (you remember your password/have enough licenses don't you?), selecting the right project, applying a few filters, removing the lanes you aren't interested in and hopefully getting a view of the current iteration.
Of course, you still might want to use a tool for history, backups or to share across team sites. I know of one rambunctious manager who likes to wander around project rooms silently removing random cards from stories walls, just to see what would happen!
The major factor is visibility: regardless of what lanes you use, it is close to instant to view where each story is at and who is working on what. Compare this with logging onto your web-based story management tool (you remember your password/have enough licenses don't you?), selecting the right project, applying a few filters, removing the lanes you aren't interested in and hopefully getting a view of the current iteration.
Of course, you still might want to use a tool for history, backups or to share across team sites. I know of one rambunctious manager who likes to wander around project rooms silently removing random cards from stories walls, just to see what would happen!
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
LinuxConf 2009 Sys Admin Miniconf Review
Original Post: Robert Postill
I went to LinuxConf Australia 2009 (LCA) this year and had a great time. Its the first time I've been to Hobart and Tasmania but I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. I can't recommend Hobart as a city highly enough. The scenery is lovely, very picturesque and unlike Melbourne or Sydney taxi drivers know where they're going, you gotta love that :) Also the food is good and the beer, well let me say the cascade brewery is well worth the visit!
Anyway, on to the point. The first two days of LCA are the mini-confs which split over various topics, personally I get the biggest kick out of the SysAdmin mini-conf. While I've been a sysadmin before I don't get to immerse myself in sysadmin much any more in my current roles. The SysAdmin mini-conf is also a great way to ground your thinking about software and architecture as those people who have to maintain what others develop have many interesting insights about real-life technology. I visited a couple of other mini-confs and I can tell you that there is lot to be garnered from attending something out of the ordinary. For instance I spotted a couple of presentations on databases and figured, well I'm no DBA but maybe I'll see something interesting. Well sure enough the first thing I saw was SELinux used on Postgresql (see http://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/wiki/WhatIsSEPostgreSQL for more), while I managed to miss the setup the really, *really* cool bit was when the SELECT from the credit card table brought out automatically secured results (well at least the first twelve digits of the card number were replaced with Xs). Awesome! Then the mighty Monty Widenius spoke about the development of a new storage engine. Monty's talk was exactly the kind of thing that gives you real hope about Open Source, here's a guy who's been knocking out a formidable database for years (Wikipedia says 1995) and here he is helping to knock out a new storage engine for MySQL. Its a big deal and a multi-year project, yet moving the storage engine forward is, at least in my mind, moving mysql past innodb (which Oracle bought in 2005 according to Wikipedia) and I'll be looking hard at Maria next time I'm using MySql. Sadly there are some dangers to straying outside your main constituency. I decided to attend the talk called " It's all fun and games until someone wants to sue you: Reporting in the age of citizen journalism". I thought there might be some discussion about how to undertake journalistic activity and relate that back to Linux. Instead there was information like use Wordpress and YouTube (becuase obviously I've spent my entire life up to now living in a cave), some confused politics (stats about bloggers being jailed) and pointless truisms like educate yourself on the laws of copyright and defamation. It takes a lot of effort to get a presentation together for something like Linuxconf but you have to get the pitch *right* for these things. No one in a crowd of people that has paid for a ticket and travelled to another state or country just to spend a week talking Linux needs to hear that. If you want to be complete why not point people to your blog or a page on a website?
The SysAdmin miniconf kicked off with a rip-snorter on Samba4, which is a great project and an advert for working with Microsoft. They've managed to create something that looks a lot like Active Directory and did more than just hand everyone the pieces and expect them to tape it together. There was the usual discussion about how dealing with Microsoft stuff, even documented Microsoft protocols can be a frustrating experience. However at least in the case of Samba Microsoft is working with the project, lets hope that whole TomTom thing doesn't toilet the green shoots of co-operation. There followed a couple of presentations that reflect the feeling that I've personally felt as someone who has been a SysAd. That feeling is SysAd is being left in the dust of development as a craft. From my point of view its about time we started taking the inclusive approach, because systems are exploding in complexity and we need the SA community to help us tame that complexity. In the afternoon of the first day we talked Red Hat Satellite, which in the nice possible fashion is a way of Red Hat shipping you patches and keeping an eye on your licensing situation. I just can't get excited about this stuff, I tried and tried but when you stack up the Red Hat approach against the Debian approach you end up making the easy decision between some kind of Orwellian control mechanism and the feeling of freedom Linux is supposed to give you. Red Hat simply don't make the trade-off compelling enough.
The following day started off with a nice presentation of a PHP-based site that had massive exposure. The presenter was from the ISP that I think was third (second maybe) in line to host this app. The earlier contenders had got it wrong and our hero (whose name is Matt) had to try and work out how to make this thing work. As ever with a PHP app, cue stories about SQL gone nuts and bonkers traffic figures. There followed some great discussion about IPV6. The first presentation focussed on IPV6 mostly from the ISP point of view. Its almost the equivalent of climate change, we know its going to happen yet we just keep on living the way we are in the vain hope something magical will happen. Yet here we are years after the inclusion of IPV6 in everything, OSes, network devices and the kitchen sink barely ever using it. So the first presenter gave out some basic evangelism, its not scary, its not too hard to deploy and the world won't end when we deploy it. The second presentation talked about Google and how they have an IPV6 specific page (ipv6.google.com). This has allowed them to start to collect stats about IPV6 and find out two things. First, that the state of production IPV6 looks like and secondly, how bad the routing for IPV6 is. Interestingly, there are humans out there using IPV6! Well done them :) Secondly, those people sometimes take the most circuitous route through the internet. Interestingly the presenter (Angus Lees) thought things could have been worse, although that doesn't mean they're peachy. As an IPV6-denier myself I have to assume there are special IPV6 routing services I am unaware of, but sadly because they don't get the traffic these services can be misconfigured for some time without being flagged as an issue.
Google would love IPV6 because like so many others they find delivering services over NAT IPV4 is difficult and can lead to a crap experience for the end user. The Tuesday wrap up dealt with spam. Sadly the presentations were slightly out of order as the first presenter really should have come after the second presenter. Still they both had interesting things to say and as a wrap up to the mini-conf it was very solid.
Copyright (C) 2009 Robert Postill.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
GNU FDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
I went to LinuxConf Australia 2009 (LCA) this year and had a great time. Its the first time I've been to Hobart and Tasmania but I thoroughly enjoyed my time there. I can't recommend Hobart as a city highly enough. The scenery is lovely, very picturesque and unlike Melbourne or Sydney taxi drivers know where they're going, you gotta love that :) Also the food is good and the beer, well let me say the cascade brewery is well worth the visit!
Anyway, on to the point. The first two days of LCA are the mini-confs which split over various topics, personally I get the biggest kick out of the SysAdmin mini-conf. While I've been a sysadmin before I don't get to immerse myself in sysadmin much any more in my current roles. The SysAdmin mini-conf is also a great way to ground your thinking about software and architecture as those people who have to maintain what others develop have many interesting insights about real-life technology. I visited a couple of other mini-confs and I can tell you that there is lot to be garnered from attending something out of the ordinary. For instance I spotted a couple of presentations on databases and figured, well I'm no DBA but maybe I'll see something interesting. Well sure enough the first thing I saw was SELinux used on Postgresql (see http://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/wiki/WhatIsSEPostgreSQL for more), while I managed to miss the setup the really, *really* cool bit was when the SELECT from the credit card table brought out automatically secured results (well at least the first twelve digits of the card number were replaced with Xs). Awesome! Then the mighty Monty Widenius spoke about the development of a new storage engine. Monty's talk was exactly the kind of thing that gives you real hope about Open Source, here's a guy who's been knocking out a formidable database for years (Wikipedia says 1995) and here he is helping to knock out a new storage engine for MySQL. Its a big deal and a multi-year project, yet moving the storage engine forward is, at least in my mind, moving mysql past innodb (which Oracle bought in 2005 according to Wikipedia) and I'll be looking hard at Maria next time I'm using MySql. Sadly there are some dangers to straying outside your main constituency. I decided to attend the talk called " It's all fun and games until someone wants to sue you: Reporting in the age of citizen journalism". I thought there might be some discussion about how to undertake journalistic activity and relate that back to Linux. Instead there was information like use Wordpress and YouTube (becuase obviously I've spent my entire life up to now living in a cave), some confused politics (stats about bloggers being jailed) and pointless truisms like educate yourself on the laws of copyright and defamation. It takes a lot of effort to get a presentation together for something like Linuxconf but you have to get the pitch *right* for these things. No one in a crowd of people that has paid for a ticket and travelled to another state or country just to spend a week talking Linux needs to hear that. If you want to be complete why not point people to your blog or a page on a website?
The SysAdmin miniconf kicked off with a rip-snorter on Samba4, which is a great project and an advert for working with Microsoft. They've managed to create something that looks a lot like Active Directory and did more than just hand everyone the pieces and expect them to tape it together. There was the usual discussion about how dealing with Microsoft stuff, even documented Microsoft protocols can be a frustrating experience. However at least in the case of Samba Microsoft is working with the project, lets hope that whole TomTom thing doesn't toilet the green shoots of co-operation. There followed a couple of presentations that reflect the feeling that I've personally felt as someone who has been a SysAd. That feeling is SysAd is being left in the dust of development as a craft. From my point of view its about time we started taking the inclusive approach, because systems are exploding in complexity and we need the SA community to help us tame that complexity. In the afternoon of the first day we talked Red Hat Satellite, which in the nice possible fashion is a way of Red Hat shipping you patches and keeping an eye on your licensing situation. I just can't get excited about this stuff, I tried and tried but when you stack up the Red Hat approach against the Debian approach you end up making the easy decision between some kind of Orwellian control mechanism and the feeling of freedom Linux is supposed to give you. Red Hat simply don't make the trade-off compelling enough.
The following day started off with a nice presentation of a PHP-based site that had massive exposure. The presenter was from the ISP that I think was third (second maybe) in line to host this app. The earlier contenders had got it wrong and our hero (whose name is Matt) had to try and work out how to make this thing work. As ever with a PHP app, cue stories about SQL gone nuts and bonkers traffic figures. There followed some great discussion about IPV6. The first presentation focussed on IPV6 mostly from the ISP point of view. Its almost the equivalent of climate change, we know its going to happen yet we just keep on living the way we are in the vain hope something magical will happen. Yet here we are years after the inclusion of IPV6 in everything, OSes, network devices and the kitchen sink barely ever using it. So the first presenter gave out some basic evangelism, its not scary, its not too hard to deploy and the world won't end when we deploy it. The second presentation talked about Google and how they have an IPV6 specific page (ipv6.google.com). This has allowed them to start to collect stats about IPV6 and find out two things. First, that the state of production IPV6 looks like and secondly, how bad the routing for IPV6 is. Interestingly, there are humans out there using IPV6! Well done them :) Secondly, those people sometimes take the most circuitous route through the internet. Interestingly the presenter (Angus Lees) thought things could have been worse, although that doesn't mean they're peachy. As an IPV6-denier myself I have to assume there are special IPV6 routing services I am unaware of, but sadly because they don't get the traffic these services can be misconfigured for some time without being flagged as an issue.
Google would love IPV6 because like so many others they find delivering services over NAT IPV4 is difficult and can lead to a crap experience for the end user. The Tuesday wrap up dealt with spam. Sadly the presentations were slightly out of order as the first presenter really should have come after the second presenter. Still they both had interesting things to say and as a wrap up to the mini-conf it was very solid.
Copyright (C) 2009 Robert Postill.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".
GNU FDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)
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