Tuesday, September 14, 2004
NCSA meeting with Tom Limoncelli
Yesterday I attended the North Carolina System Administrator's meeting, at which Tom Limoncelli, co-author of "The Practice of System and Network Administration" gave a presentation entitled "Where the Heck is my Flying Car." This meeting for a change was not held at the usual location of Dreyfus Auditorium in RTP, but rather at Red Hat's corporate headquarters in Raleigh.
The flyer advertising this meeting read as follows: "It's 2004 and we still don't have moving side-walks or flying cars, and computers aren't nearly as cool as they were on The Jetsons. Tom has visited many sites in the last few years and observed a lot of really bad IT practices. He will discuss what he saw and some recent epiphanies he's had about "best practices" in system administration. The second half of the talk will be about his current project to update a small company's IT infrastructure. It has forced him to rethink what constitutes the "basic infrastructure" of an IT organization, and how big companies are held back when they forget the basics. He's also working on a new book about "time management for sysadmins," and will be treating us to some excerpts! Tom Limoncelli is Director of IT Services at Cibernet Corp. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he has worked at Dean for America presidential campaign, Lumeta Corp, Bell Labs, Lucent, AT&T, Mentor Graphics and Drew University. A frequent speaker at Usenix and LISA conferences, he holds as B.A. in C.S.
The slides he used at this presentation can be found here.
The salient points that I got out of this presentation are as follows:
- 20 years ago there were a few good IT shops and a lot of bad ones. Now there are a few good IT shops, a lot of bad ones, a huge amount of really bad ones. This happened because very small sites started appearing, and small sites tend not to have IT teams.
- The problem arose because admins had become slack on the fundamentals of what they are doing.
- There are no hard and fast rules about what constitute best practices. Unlike the construction industry, there are no "codes" that need to be followed and no "inspectors" to make sure that the codes are enforced.
- The state of "best practices" was discussed. Vendors put forth "best practices" for the use of their products. They can range from Sun Microsystems, who has best practices that nobody really follows to Microsoft who can be downright fascist about their insistence that they get followed.
- Other sources for "best practices" are SAGE's Short Topic Booklet Series, Tutorials (for example from LISA), books, Sysadmin Book of Knowledge (BoK) and the Sysadmin Capability Maturity Model.
- Next, he presented lessons learned from rebuilding a small IT site. The first task was to get the fundamentals right. Then move from the old way of thinking in terms of MTTR (Mean Time to Recall) to the new model of using SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Component failure needs to be decoupled from outages. Redundancy in hardware and software needs to be built in, so that users are not affected by failure. Make sure that basic stability is there; test backups. He illustrated these concepts by outlining the steps he took to bring a small company up to speed.
Following his presentation he read a few excerpts from his upcoming book about Time Management.
Comments []
The flyer advertising this meeting read as follows: "It's 2004 and we still don't have moving side-walks or flying cars, and computers aren't nearly as cool as they were on The Jetsons. Tom has visited many sites in the last few years and observed a lot of really bad IT practices. He will discuss what he saw and some recent epiphanies he's had about "best practices" in system administration. The second half of the talk will be about his current project to update a small company's IT infrastructure. It has forced him to rethink what constitutes the "basic infrastructure" of an IT organization, and how big companies are held back when they forget the basics. He's also working on a new book about "time management for sysadmins," and will be treating us to some excerpts! Tom Limoncelli is Director of IT Services at Cibernet Corp. A sysadmin and network wonk since 1987, he has worked at Dean for America presidential campaign, Lumeta Corp, Bell Labs, Lucent, AT&T, Mentor Graphics and Drew University. A frequent speaker at Usenix and LISA conferences, he holds as B.A. in C.S.
The slides he used at this presentation can be found here.
The salient points that I got out of this presentation are as follows:
- 20 years ago there were a few good IT shops and a lot of bad ones. Now there are a few good IT shops, a lot of bad ones, a huge amount of really bad ones. This happened because very small sites started appearing, and small sites tend not to have IT teams.
- The problem arose because admins had become slack on the fundamentals of what they are doing.
- There are no hard and fast rules about what constitute best practices. Unlike the construction industry, there are no "codes" that need to be followed and no "inspectors" to make sure that the codes are enforced.
- The state of "best practices" was discussed. Vendors put forth "best practices" for the use of their products. They can range from Sun Microsystems, who has best practices that nobody really follows to Microsoft who can be downright fascist about their insistence that they get followed.
- Other sources for "best practices" are SAGE's Short Topic Booklet Series, Tutorials (for example from LISA), books, Sysadmin Book of Knowledge (BoK) and the Sysadmin Capability Maturity Model.
- Next, he presented lessons learned from rebuilding a small IT site. The first task was to get the fundamentals right. Then move from the old way of thinking in terms of MTTR (Mean Time to Recall) to the new model of using SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Component failure needs to be decoupled from outages. Redundancy in hardware and software needs to be built in, so that users are not affected by failure. Make sure that basic stability is there; test backups. He illustrated these concepts by outlining the steps he took to bring a small company up to speed.
Following his presentation he read a few excerpts from his upcoming book about Time Management.
Comments []
