BigFix's 2010 IT Dinosaur Awards Video Contest
"It's open season on enterprise IT evolutionary throwbacks!"
BigFix is having a contest. They're asking system administrators to submit a video of themselves explaining an "IT Dinosaur" that you've experienced. That is, "technologies that have outlived their extinct-by dates--not the companies you work for".
I've been invited to just the videos so you better make them good!
AT&T
AT&T's De la Vega is getting in trouble for saying that they want to find ways to discourage people from using their data plans. It turns out that AT&T's data network is overloaded and rather than fix the problem, they think punishing their users will help.
As an AT&T customer, it makes me sick.
As an ex-AT&T employee, it just reminds me of why I was so happy to leave.
This is what you get for having salespeople run the company instead of engineers. Engineers would have budgeted for appropriate growth to match customer growth.
AT&T's mindset is that bandwidth is scarce. Every bit is so impossibly costly that it must be measured, counted, monitored, and charged for. On my first day as an employee I had to watch a 30 minute video that did nothing but explain that I can't make a single personal phone call from the office; it looked like it has been made when phone calls were still $3/minute. Don't waste their precious, precious bandwidth.
Bandwidth was expensive for the first 100 years of their history, but it certainly isn't true now. What made the internet great was thinking in terms of plenty, not scarcity.
I remember when "the web" (HTTP) was new. A friend at a different division of AT&T told me their engineers were fearful of HTTP and didn't want it to catch on because their network could never handle such a graphic-rich system (this was 1992 or 1993). I couldn't figure out why they weren't thinking, "Yeah! An opportunity to sell more bandwidth!" If you sell apples, don't you want to freely distribute apple pie recipes? If you sell paint don't you want to encourage everyone to repair their house? Ugh. If AT&T was selling bacon they'd be encouraging everyone to become a vegan.
At the time UUNET (the first commercial ISP) was giving away free Usenet feeds (at this time this was a HUGE amount of bandwidth) and paying people to develop open source Usenet software: all to make it easier for people to need more bandwidth. I thought UUNET's way was much smarter.
It also annoyed me, as an employee, that AT&T kept acting as if Moore's Law didn't exist. This is odd because the Moore revealed this observation during a presentation at AT&T's Bell Labs. Maybe they have to remember that Nielsen's Law makes similar claims about bandwidth. Pushed on by cheaper electronics, bandwidth gets cheaper too.
The biggest innovations in computing have come from brashly using more resources, usually slightly ahead of the supply curve. Textual user interfaces were a "waste of CPU" when first seen by batch computing people. Graphical user interfaces were a "waste of CPU" at first, but now it is what enables billions of people to use computers. RAID was a "waste of disk" but now I would never build a server without it.
The other attitude that I saw at AT&T was sheer shock and surprise that anything changes. "What? We built this thing for our customer base and... there are more customers a year later? They want new features? How could anyone have expected that?" Combine that with an intentional ignorance of Moore's Law and you have a disaster.
A disaster called AT&T.
Yes, AT&T, you have the best selling phone. People use it for data more than voice. The data apps are what make it such a success. Why do I get the feeling that when you negotiated with Apple you thought, "Sure, we'll throw in flat-rate data plans... it isn't like anyone is going to use that stuff!"
Are you still thinking that the internet is a "fad" like CEO Robert Allen?
My AT&T/iPhone contract is over in a few months. Maybe when it ends I should help De la Vega's bandwidth problem by not using his network at all.
P.S. I have a lot of pent up anger bout my AT&T service because twice a day as I take the train from Bloomfield, NJ to New York City and back I am faced with dead-spots at key locations such as the Secaucus transfer station, Watsessing Ave, and others locations along the way. It is frustrating to be on the train and see other passengers using Verizon and T-Mobile able to talk on their phone (and I presume surf the web) at all the points that I can't. It is my twice-a-day reminder to leave AT&T that I could be doing better with a different vendor.
UK Government officially apologizes for "appalling" treatment of Alan Turing
I've long been a fan of Alan Turing, even writing a big paper about his mistreatment my freshman year of college (talking about gay stuff was much more radical in 1987. I nearly cried while giving the oral report portion of the project). For those of you that don't know, Alan Turing not only invented what we now call computer science, but broke the German code which directly led to The Allies winning World War II. One man can really change the world.Nominations open for "Sysadmin of the year"!
Read all about it! Spread the word so all your friends and co-workers know to nominate that great person that runs their systems! :-)
Follow the event on on Twitter as @SysAdRockstar09, Facebook group, and LinkedIn group. For full information on the contest visit www.bigfix.com/rockstar.
Interviews about IPv6 migration
Randy Bush makes an interesting financial point that might help you explain IPv6 to the finance people: Pay a little now or pay a lot in the future. Plus a very good point: Do a single service like making your DNS dual-stacked. You'll be more focused and you'll find where the problems are going to be.
Netflix Streaming over IPv6
Netflix has announced their streaming service is now accessible over IPv6. This means that their CDN provider, Limelight, is now the first CDN to provide IPv6 service. Netflix says it took two months of engineering (from initial idea to completion) and Limelight says they only had to allocate two engineers to the project. IPv6 is easy. Forget all your old misconceptions.At my house we have Comcast for our internet access. Now I just need them to provide it and I'm ready! If Comcast needs a beta tester, please reach me! tal at everything sysadmin dot com, folks!
Warehouse-Scale Machines: The Datacenter as a Computer
The term "Warehouse-Scale" Machines has been coined. The term describes the specific design that sites like Google use. The data centers that Google runs aren't like other data centers where each rack has a mish-mosh of machines that result as various people request and fill rack space. It's more like a single huge machine running many processes. A machine has memory, CPUs, and storage and buses that connect them all. A warehouse-scale machine has thousands of machines all with a few, specific, configurations. You treat the machines as CPUs and/or storage; the network is the bus that connects them all.There is a new on-line book (108 pages!) by the people at Google that are in charge of the Google data center operations (disclaimer: Urz is my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss)
by Luiz André Barroso and Urs Hölzle, Google Inc.
Abstract
As computation continues to move into the cloud, the computing platform of interest no longer resembles a pizza box or a refrigerator, but a warehouse full of computers. These new large datacenters are quite different from traditional hosting facilities of earlier times and cannot be viewed simply as a collection of co-located servers. Large portions of the hardware and software resources in these facilities must work in concert to efficiently deliver good levels of Internet service performance, something that can only be achieved by a holistic approach to their design and deployment. In other words, we must treat the datacenter itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer (WSC). We describe the architecture of WSCs, the main factors influencing their design, operation, and cost structure, and the characteristics of their software base. We hope it will be useful to architects and programmers of today's WSCs, as well as those of future many-core platforms which may one day implement the equivalent of today's WSCs on a single board.
http://www.morganclaypool.com/toc/cac/4/1
Oracle buys Sun. Good idea for everything except databases
According to Merrill R. (Rick) Chapman's book, there is an oft repeated pattern in the computer industry where a company suddenly finds itself with two products in the same market space, and ends up not being able to sell either. They spend all their time trying to explain to customers why they should buy one or the other, when really the truth is that they are too similar to differentiate. Meanwhile a competitor (usually Microsoft) comes in with one product, a clear message ("it's the best!") and puts the other company out of business. If the other company had sold off or canceled one of its two similar products the disaster would have been avoided.
I consider that book the best book on how the major players in the software industry got to where they are today. When it came out it got hardly any press. Hardly anyone has heard of it. I think that's sad. It is a "best kept secret" book. It is written by a person that was "there when it happened" and he tells the stories in excellent detail. Each chapter teaches you something important. Oh, and most of his case studies involve companies that were beaten by Microsoft. If you don't want history to repeat itself, read this book.
If I was Oracle, I'd sell off MySQL and PostgreSQL right away.
Google enables IPv6 for most services (but there is a catch!)
Google has enabled IPv6 for most services but ISPs have to contact them and verify that their IPv6 is working properly before their users can take advantage of this.I'm writing about this to spread the word. Many readers of this blog work at ISPs and hopefully many of them have IPv6 rolled out, or are in the process of doing so.
Technically here's what happens: Currently DNS lookups of www.google.com return A records (IPv4), and no AAAA records (IPv6). If you run an ISP that has rolled out IPv6, Google will add you (your DNS servers, actually) to a white-list used to control Google's DNS servers. After that, DNS queries of www.google.com will return both an A and AAAA record(s).
What's the catch? The catch is that they are enabling it on a per-ISP basis. So, you need to badger your ISP about this.
Why not just enable it for all ISPs? There are some OSs that have default configurations that get confused if they see an AAAA record yet don't have full IPv6 connectivity. In particular, if you have IPv6 enabled at your house, but your ISP doesn't support IPv6, there is a good chance that your computer isn't smart enough to know that having local IPv6 isn't the same as IPv6 connectivity all the way across the internet. Thus, it will send out requests over IPv6 which will stall as the packets get dropped by the first non-IPv6 router (your ISP).
Thus, it is safer to just send AAAA records if you are on an ISP that really supports IPv6. Eventually this kind of thing won't be needed, but for now it is a "better safe than sorry" measure. Hopefully if a few big sites do this then the internet will become "safe" for IPv6 and everyone else won't need to take such measures.
If none of this makes sense to you, don't worry. It is really more important that your ISP understands. Though, as a system administrator it is a good idea to get up to speed on the issues. I can recommend 2 great books:
- My friend Karl Siil recently released a book specifically on the topic of IPv6 transition issues for government enterprises, yet the on-line preview is brilliantly useful for enterprise and other sysadmins looking to get an introduction to the protocol, the history, and other issues: IPv6 Mandates: Choosing a Transition Strategy, Preparing Transition Plans, and Executing the Migration of a Network to IPv6, by Karl Siil. (Buy Online)
- The best practical sysadmin-oriented book on IPv6 is "IPv6 Network Administration", By Niall Richard Murphy, David Malone.(Buy Online)
Programming competition for East African students
Google (my employer) has announced a "Google Gadget" competition for students in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia. The designer of the best gadget will a $600 USD stipend, five runners-up will receive a $350 USD stipend. Prize categories include Best Gadget UI, Best Local Content Gadget (Most Locally Useful Gadget), Best Education Specific Gadget, Best Procrastination Gadget, Most Technically Sophisticated Gadget, Gadget Most Likely to Get International Traffic, and Best Social Gadget.
Complete details are available on the East Africa Google Gadget Competition website. A PDF suitable for your university bulletin board is available here.
Women and Latin Americans in Open Source
A co-worker of mine, Fernanda Weiden, was interviewed on the FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Fernanda Weiden of Google in Zurich gives her perspectives on women and Latin Americans in the open source community, the Brazilian Women in Free Software, Debian Women and the Free Software Foundation of Latin America
True story about Fernanda: She taught herself English by reading Linux "man" pages.
I appreciate you!
Today is the 8th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. I know this sounds kind of funny, but I really appreciate all the system administrators out there. I meet a lot of system administrators. I visit a lot of sites. I hear stories about heroics, and I hear stories of people who persist even though they are working with terrible management, unappreciative users, and CEOs that treat IT as a "cost center" instead of an investment in future corporate growth.
Last week the 2nd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration started shipping. The new edition includes a lot of new anecdotes, many from the fan mail we've received over the years. Some of the fan mail is fun, like when we were told that something we suggested helped recover from an outage a few hours faster, which saved his company $100,000. Often we are pleased to receive email from someone who's received a promotion and wanted to thank us for writing a book that was instrumental to their career. But most of all I want to say that I am humbled by the messages we've received from the lonely system administrators: The under-appreciated person struggling to fix a big mess they inherited, with all the responsibility when it fails but none of the authority to fix the larger problems. We received email from one person who, when reading the book, burst into sobs after realizing she wasn't "the only one".
This will be the second year that I'm volunteering to judge SysAdmin Of The Year. Nominations are open, so email the URL (http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/) to all your friends. The first 2500 nominated sysadmins get a free tshirt, which is pretty cool in itself.
Tom
P.S. If you are in the Philly/NJ/DE/NY area (or aren't, but like last-minute travel), don't forget that I'l be doing my time-management training classes during the tutorial part of LOPSA's SysadminDays local conference, August 6-7, 2007, in Cherry Hill, NJ (just outside Philadelphia).
Book Recommendation: What All Network Administrators Know
I just came across Douglas Chick's book, "What All Network Administrators Know". I immediately rushed to add it to our web page of recommended titles (scroll to the bottom).
One of the problems with TPOSANA is that it really focuses on big sites. This book is perfect for sysadmins that are just getting started or are at a small site. It is down to earth, very practical, and contains tons of excellent advice. (If you want proof, preview it on Amazon by clicking on the "random page" button.)
Sysadmin Appreciation Day and Sysadmin Of The Year
Don't forget (or don't forget to remind your boss) that Friday, July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. www.sysadminday.com
However the new hotness is the 2006 Sysadmin Of The Year contest. Sponsored by Splunk, LOPSA, and many other organizations. One Grand Prize winner will receive a $2,500 Splunk Professional license and an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference December 3-7, 2006. More than 2,500 other prizes will be awarded. Nominate someone today!
