I am really excited that I am going to go to PICC (http://picconf.org). The organizers have put together some great short videos of some of the speakers. I like this one: http://www.youtube.com/user/lopsavideo#p/u/12/oK4cg7R3_88 Tom Limoncelli interviews Eben Haber, PICC keynote speaker, about his research, his keynote topic, and why he is excited to come to the…
In my [last post|https://lopsa.org/node/1903] I gave some first impressions using [bcfg2|http://trac.mcs.anl.gov/projects/bcfg2]. We ended up selecting bcfg2 as our configuration management system for a new project. I’m going to start with the “bad” and get that out of the way. ===The bad=== The biggest problem so far is getting the entire team up to speed on…
2010 ACM Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction for the Management of Information Technology (CHIMIT ’10) http://chimit10.org November 12-13, 2010 San Jose, CA USA Co-located with the 24th USENIX Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA ’10) http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa10/ Since 2007, CHIMIT has been the leading forum for discussing topics on IT management with a focus on people, business,…
I picked up a couple of the new WD Green 1.5TB drives recently. I needed some new storage, and these drives have a lot going for them: – 64MB cache – low power usage – 4K sector size I knew going into this that the 4K sector size was proving problematic in some circumstances. In…
Anyone who has ever administered a Cisco Unified Communications Manager (AKA Call Manager, or CM) system learns very quickly that there are approximately 17 billion different configuration settings in CM. All of those configuration dials have to be maintained in the right ways to get the system to do what you want.
I’ve taken several Cisco training courses on CM, and I felt like the thing that was missing was a real-world case study of how you setup all the pieces to interact with each other and why. There was no real “best practices” in the classes, just a lot of “this setting does X or Y” without any explanation of why you would choose to do X vs Y.
Read on for exactly that information from documentation I’ve been working on for the CM environment at my job.
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In my last post I mentioned starting a quick eval of the existing config management tools. I ended up with bcfg2,so I got to spend some time Friday starting to look at it. Armed with the SAGE [short topics book|http://www.sage.org/pubs/19_bcfg2/] and the online docs, I managed to get it installed and doing some stuff. These…
Going to SCALE 8x today – I’ll be in the LOPSA booth, PostgreSQL booth and doing FOSS tours. Do I know how to overcommit or what?
I’m teaching on LDAP at SCaLE U today, so I’ve uploaded my slides in advance.
At $WORK, we currently use cfengine 2 to manage on the order of 300 systems. It works, it does most things we want. We use the [Singlecopy Nirvana|http://cfwiki.org/cfwiki/index.php/Singlecopy_Nirvana] “pattern” to distribute configuration files of all types, have copious shellcommands, and even a few editfiles. In general, it does what I need, but not necessarily the…