Archive for the 'System Administration' Category
May 14th, 2008 by Mark Ramm
Prolonged adolecence is not a new problem, it’s just new to the masses:
Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings….
Paul Graham
You can’t shelter people from everything bad or scary, and expect them to live in the real world.
Project managers, System Administrators, and parents should take note of this.
People can only step up and take responsibility when they actually know what’s going on. Seems to me that there are lessons for how we talk to people about project risks, how we handle e-mail spam problems, and how we think about IT services. It’ll be a while before I figure out what exactly all of those lessons are….
January 31st, 2007 by Mark Ramm
Remote administration is the name of the game for the independant contractor. In a past life I did system administration for a living, and programming as a hobby. Now the situation is reversed, except System Administration is a boring hobby.
But at least with good tools, I can participate this odd hobby in the comfort of my own home.
SSH makes Remote administration of linux/Unix servers remarkably easy. Unfortunately Windows 2k/2k3 requires a GUI for Remote administration, but Microsoft generosity has alloted two Terminal Server Clients for remote administration purposes on every Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 Server they sell. Unfortunately, sometimes you get disconnected unintentionally. If this happens twice, you could get the dreaded “The terminal server has exceeded the maximum number of allowed connections” error.
Now, you can’t even connect to disconnect the old sessions. You’re screwed, and you need to drive an hour to the server and get to the machine and kill the inactive sessions.
Not really, you can just:
start | run - mstsc -v:10.10.10.10 /f -console
This attaches you to the special “console” session, which kicks whoever is logged in locally off and allows you to remote control the machine again. You can then kill the inactive sessions and move on with your life. Always kill the inactive sessions first, because if you get disconnected again you will have to drive in.
Since I normally run Linux at home, I don’t use the above command, I use:
rdesktop -0
I also have a shiny new MacBook which isn’t always booted into Ubuntu Linux, sometimes it actually runs Mac OS X. Have no fear I can use the Remote Desktop Client to connect to the console session:
No fancy command line option here, but you can hold down the command (open apple) key and click the Connect button.
If you control the server, and you don’t have any long running user processes you want to be able to reconnect to on the server I highly recommend also setting up your servers to automatically disconnect inactive sessions.
That way even if you get disconnected, you just have to wait a few min. until the first connection to drop times out.
February 2nd, 2006 by Mark Ramm
I’ve been using Moodle here at Compound Thinking for the TurboGears classes (look for new classes coming soon!) and I am setting one up at work. The classes will be optional, but we’ll do contests and prizes for the most activity, the highest average quiz score, etc. It all started as a way to get people to take the time to find new ways to use their computers to do cool things. The classes will teach things like logging, editing photos, using flickr, putting together DVD sideshows, along with the standard Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Open Office training.
Hopefully other people outside IT will post classes that will help us bring new people on board more quickly. This is functionality we need, but I am hoping that it also helps to communicate that the IT department exists to amplify people’s ability to execute on their creative ideas.
Too many companies have an ingrained view of IT as nay-sayers and obstructionists. Or, even worse they see IT people as trying to automate them out of a job. The tools we deploy, and the way we deploy them speak volumes about how we view our jobs — and people know how to read the message we send.
How powerful would it be if everybody saw IT as a lever they could use to move their individual worlds? What if they believed that IT connected to the things they really care about — even if those things aren’t always work related.
Studies at Gallop show that people are consistently happier and more productive when “someone at work cares about [them] as a person.”
So, if IT’s job is to make people more productive, it also needs to be IT’s job to care about people.
January 20th, 2006 by Mark Ramm
A strange Microsoft Excel problem got passed up the chain to me today. We had to re-create a workbook that had lots of links to data from other workbooks. Yea, one of those Excel is a database nightmares that I keep wanting to replace, but we never have time or money to do it.
Anyway, the new sheet showed dates that were four years and 1 day older than what they ought to be. So a project with a billing date that should have been January 20, 2006 was showing up as billing on January 19, 2002. Nobody could figure it out, and because it is something pretty critical to our business (billing is about as business critical as it gets) it made it’s way up to me right away.
The dates were formated in different ways in the original spreadsheets, but if you turned them back into plain numbers you could see that they were both coming up as 37275. Anyway to make a long story short, it turns out that Excel has a feature labeled “1904 dates system” which is available under the options menu.
This means that under the covers Excel stores dates as the number of days since January 1 1900. Unless of course you have “1904 date system” turned on, in which case it counts days since January 2nd 1904.
As features go, this one seemed pretty absurd to me, but it turns out that this has something to do with Office on the Mac and some 10 year (at least) bug in Mac OS.
It seems like a little bit of foresight 15 years ago would have prevented Microsoft from having to maintain this feature for I don’t know how many versions of office. But, even though the bug this was originally designed to work around has long been fixed, the workaround is still generating work at Microsoft, and for helpdesk people around the world!
Oh well, at least this kind of thing keeps our lives interesting.
November 29th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
TPoSaNA is great!
If you manage computer systems, or the people who manage the people who manage computer systems, you should buy and read this book!
Oh, the full title is The Practice of System and network Administration, and it is highly technical without ever delving into the specifics any specific vendor or technological solution. A lot of things in this book will feel intuitively obvious to the experienced system administrator, but I know I couldn’t have articulated them all very easily without reading the book.
Not only that, the book is well written, and includes enough interesting stories of real life system administration to assure that you will probably laugh out loud at least a couple of times when reading it.
If you manage a large number of systems, or critical servers, this book has information that will make your life better. Buy it, read it, be more successful at work, and have more fun. You’ll learn ways to set up your network so you don’t have to worry about it while you are on vacation — and you’ll learn ways to have more fun at work. Heck, there’s even a chapter called “Being Happy.”