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Agile Methods in System Administration?
sta asks: "Agile methodologies focusing on development techniques and approaches abound, many of which at the very least give food for thought. I have been in constant discussion with our dev manager about agile approaches and their extension to the systems administration world. Can agile methods and the agile mind set be applied to the systems administration world? Does systems administration rely on policy and procedure for it's integrity and reliability or is that just an ingrained habit? There appear to be a number of administrative tools that claim agility but are there any established agile methodologies?"
Of the top of my head, while I doubt it can be applied in its entirity to all of "system administration" in any realistic way, two things are possible, I think.
First, and most obviously, you can apply agile methodologies to creating sysadmin tools to help you do your job.
Second, more subtlely, and perhaps more importantly, you can apply the idea of pervasive testing, probably the most important tenant of agile methodologies (although that's my opinion, not necessarily held by the "experts"), to your sysadmin job.
Every time a user calls you up and says a resource is down, and you didn't already know about it, that is a failure. Really, creating test scripts for such things isn't too hard on average; a script to send email through the corporate email system and retrieve it, once a minute. A script to iterate through all user files and do some basic permission checks every night. A script that pings critical machines every five seconds and does something drastic if they don't reply.
A lot of this is available haphazardly already, some of it you'd have to write, and some things you'd have to get a little creative with. (Example: Checking if the voice mail system is still up is not impossible, but would take a bit of work.) What I'd recommend to go forward in an "agile" sense is to start plucking low lying fruit: Whatever you current most common problem is that you get from users, write a script to detect it before they do. Then proceed to the next most common problem.
A completely adaptive system that detects everything is probably out of your reach. On the other hand, the number of relatively simple precautions that could be taken and aren't sometimes surprises me. You can reach a happy middle in most cases, I think.
Lard.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I suspect there is some ridiculous "methodology" called "Agile" that those silly programmers use to try and make their code less sucky, and the poster wonders if it could be usefully applied to SA work.
Well, unless it involves us learning how to get a job where we can put any misconfigured piece of DHCP request answering shit on someones production network, then go away to play pool on the table that was installed "because we're creative and have special needs", then I don't really want to know...
But, let's be fair and take a look at what agile is... (from http://agilemanifesto.org/)
Processes are bad.
"Hey, my account won't let me sign in!"
"Yeah man, that new account generation proccess that ensures you get access to the dozen departmental systems that people designed themselves because they know better, that was just too fascist for me man!"
Deliver stuff early when it partially works - yes, we SAs invented that, it's called kludging.
Talking to people in your team is a good way of communicating - yes, also we've heard there's this thing called fire that you can use to heat things up.
Working software is the primary measure of progress - you don't say! Really? I also heard there's this thing called fire that you can use to make cold things hotter.
You should try to make your software well designed and technially excellent - that's where my Perl scripts have been going wrong! I've been trying to make them shit all this time! D'oh!
Motivated people make better programmers - cattle prods are motivating, aren't they?
Do I sound bitter? Well, today I had to spend an hour of my life (that I won't get back again) teaching a perfecty intelligent person how to jump through the stupid hoops needed to make a piece of shoddy software designed by an intellectually challenged monkey perform a simple task for them. Yeah, making all twenty icons look the same, that was good idea. Maximise should show you more of the current document? No way man, it's just a conspiracy - don't let those Micro$oft bastards force you to comply to interface standards.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?