Ready for LISA 2008 in San Diego!
I've registered, I've booked my hotel. Are you going to LISA 2008?
On Thursday I will be doing a 90-minute open Q&A session about Time Management. Feel free to stop by and ask me anything.
On Friday I will be presenting my newest talk titled, "System Administration and The Economics of Plenty". When we start to see how plentiful the world is, we think about our roles as system administrators differently. It affects everything from how we set policy to how we do our jobs.
Register online today!
I hope to see you there!
Tom @ Ohio LinuxFest 2008, Columbus, Ohio, October 10-11, 2008
Tom will be teaching two half-day tutorials: "Time Management for System Administrators" and "Interviewing and Hiring System Administrators". This is a rare opportunity to see these talks presented in the Ohio area. Register soon!With the economy in a down-turn, Time Management is key to being efficient at what you do. With people's hiring budgets being slashed, it is important that the people you do hire are top notch. Both of these tutorials are intended for both the new and experienced system administrator or IT manager.
The sixth annual Ohio LinuxFest will be held on October 10-11, 2008 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in downtown Columbus, Ohio. Hosting authoritative speakers and a large expo, the Ohio LinuxFest welcomes Free and Open Source Software professionals, enthusiasts, and anyone who wants to take part in the event. The Ohio LinuxFest is a free, grassroots conference for the Linux/Open Source Software/Free Software community
Keeping inventory data accurate
In system administration we have to keep many lists: lists of users, lists of machines, lists of IP addresses, and so on. The only way to keep information from growing stale is to make sure key processes are driven off of the live database.
Here are three different techniques I've seen used:
Level 1: Periodically gather the information. A spreadsheet is great for this and simple. Once a year you collect information and then you spend 354 days with out-of-date information. I've seen this in a number of places. At Lucent they hired a company to document "everything with a power plug" once a year. The information was put into a big read-only database that everyone ignored. I wonder how much they paid for this "service".
Level 2. Automatic collection. You know that, at least for the machines you know about, data is being collected and it is, hopefully staying up to date. If the process is automated, you can run the process weekly or daily. Machines can stay hidden if the "discovery" software isn't very good, or if someone wants it to stay hidden.
Level 3. Actively-used data. Rather than storing data, if you actively use it then you know it is up to date because people are dedicated to keeping it up to date. They receive a benefit, not just you. If the inventory is used to drive software upgrades, then people will complain they are "left behind" and you'll know to add them to the inventory. If patches only go to machines in the inventory, then sysadmins are compelled to keep the list accurate so they aren't dealing with security flaws.
Level 3 is a self-correcting system, which saves times and assures far greater accuracy than other solutions.
A company with limited IP address space found itself constantly emailing its engineers begging them to return unused IP addresses that had been allocated to them. Nobody listened. When they changed the IP allocation process to be a "rental agreement" that required semiyearly confirmation that they IP address was still in active use (they received email with a link to confirm the ownership), suddenly the list became much more accurate.
The pressure for a person to keep the data should be self-serving to the person, not you. Employees are quick to demand corrections to any inaccuracies related to payroll, right? The payroll department has an incentive to pay everyone their accurate salary. The employee has an incentive to make sure they are paid the correct amount, and make sure their home address and such is accurate. I once saw a company try to send holiday cards to each employee. A secretary was about to blast email to everyone asking for their home address. Since the email wasn't going to say why she needed their address (the card was a surprise), I was sure it was going to cause nothing but a big flap about privacy. Instead I encouraged her to simply get permission to use people's home address as listed in the payroll system. While monthly paychecks were direct-deposit, bonuses and tax-info was sent by paper-mail. Everyone kept that database extremely accurate.
What do you use to keep inventories and other lists of information up to date?
Tom @ $GROUPNAME in New Jersey, Nov 15, 2006
Tom will be doing a dress-rehearsal of his "Site Reliability @ Google" talk at $GROUPNAME this Wednesday night. Be the first to hear his new material.
The person that carpools with the most first-timers (people new to $GROUPNAME) will receive a free copy of his book, Time Management for System Administrators, from O'Reilly.
Location: CoRE Auditorium, Rutgers Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ.
Time: 7pm
For more information, visit their web site: www.groupname.org
Tom + Strata @ LISA '06 in Wash D.C., Dec 3-8, 2006
Tom and Strata be teaching and speaking at LISA 2006 in Washington D.C., Dec 3-9, 2006. This is one of our favorite conferences of the year because it is so dam useful. Get your boss to send ya. This year it is in Washington D.C., which makes it easy to get to for all the east-coasters that usually don't get around.
Tom will be speaking/teaching:
| Mon | 9am-5pm | Workshop | Managing Sysadmins (co-facilitator) |
| Wed | 2pm-3:30 | Invited Talk | Site Reliability at Google/My First Year at Google |
| Thu | AM | Tutorial | Time Management: Getting It All Done and Not Going (More) Crazy! |
| Thu | 12:30pm-1:30pm | Exhibition | "Meet the Authors" at Reiter's Conference Bookstore |
| Thu | 2pm-3:30 | Guru Talk | How to Get Your Paper Accepted at LISA |
| Thu | 4pm-5:40 | Guru Talk | Time Management for System Administrators |
| Fri | 11am-12:30 | Hit The Ground Running | Mac OS X |
Strata Rose Chalup will be speaking/teaching:
| Mon | PM | Tutorial | Project Troubleshooting |
| Wed | PM | Tutorial | Problem-Solving for IT Professionals |
| Thu | AM | Tutorial | Practical Project Management for Sysadmins and IT Professionals |
| Wed | 9pm-10pm | BOF | Sysadmin Education |
In addition, we will be hanging out in what is known as "the hallway track". In fact, if you haven't attended LISA before, you should know that a lot of the educational value is the people you meet. Tom says, "Early in my career a lot of what I learned was from the conversations in the hallway."
- More info about LISA 2006, Washington D.C., Dec 3-8, 2006
- Register for LISA 2006
Coming soon: Book signing and other events.
Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department
At LISA2005 Brent Chapman gave an excellent talk "Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department". (Slides are webified here or download the PDF).
The ICS methodology has a lot of really good points to it. Adopting it for IT work should have a lot of benefits, not just in emergencies:
If you use it for "routine" and pre-planned events like moves, upgrades, and deployments, your team will be more comfortable using it for "surprise" events like outages and security incidents.Brent has more about LISA2005 in his blog entry.
