July 2004 Archives

w00t! It's Sysadmin Appreciation day! What could be better?

System Administrator Appreciation Day - A special day, once a year, to acknowledge the worthiness and appreciation of the person occupying the role, especially as it is often this person who really keeps the wheels of your company turning.

1. Read about the day: www.sysadminday.com
2. UserFriendly's cartoon: www.userfriendly.org
3. Do something good for yourself and join Usenix/SAGE: www.sage.org
4. Schedule some "me time" and register for LISA in the US, or SANE in Europe.

We're pleased to announce that Tom will be teaching a new and updated version of his class, "Time Management for System Administrators: Getting it all done and not going (more) crazy!" the Open Source Convention 2004 at the Portland Marriott Downtown, Portland, Oregon, July 26, 2004 - July 30, 2004. The class will be on July 26, 1:45pm to 5:15pm. More details soon.

I really like Apple OS X. I really, really, really like it. It's what Unix people have been begging for for years: Full BSD unix with a kick-butt GUI. The email reader alone is reason to switch. I'm a recent convert to the Mac world and now I'm converting my entire 8.5B company to be running on Macs.

However, OS X Server doesn't seem to be ready for prime time. There's so much great stuff (Admin Tool) but once you start using it for real-word situations it seems to be, well, incomplete. OpenDirectory is buggy, the open-source tools they provide are based on old versions of code (Cyrus, postfix, Apache, OpenLDAP, others) with tons of known bugs. I'm very happy with my Xserve G4s and G5s, but now that I've put them in a co-lo, I see all these little annoyances that make me long for a Dell 1440 1U server running FreeBSD.

Can anyone help this author get in touch with product management for OS X Server? I'd love to pick their brains and get an understanding about the product's future. (And, yes, I've read everything about Tiger and have the preview releases).

Tom
[email protected]

We're pleased to announce that Tom's class "Time Management for System Administrators: Getting it all done and not going (more) crazy!" is sold out for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2004 in Portland, Oregon, July 26, 2004 - July 30, 2004. You can sign up for the same tutorial at LISA 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia Nov. 14-19, 2004. See you there!

On the $GROUPNAME mailing list (that's a NJ-based SAGE-local group) someone asked for help putting together a policy on how much effort Sysadmins were permitted to spend on unsupported hardware/software that users asked questions about. We have much to say about this issue.

Earlier this year I switched careers from sysadmin to aerodynamicist at a Formula 1 motor racing team (after completing a PhD in Aeronautical Engineering). As it turns out, in some ways, being an aerodynamicist at a racing team requires many of the same tools and processes as being a sysadmin. Here's what I have found...