The Decline and Fall of System Administration

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia questions whether server virtualization technologies are contributing to the decline of real server administration skills, as more and more sysadmins argue in favor of re-imaging as a solution to Unix server woes. 'This has always been the (many times undeserved) joke about clueless Windows admins: They have a small arsenal of possible fixes, and once they've exhausted the supply, they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper. On the Unix side of the house, that concept has been met with derision since the dawn of time, but as Linux has moved into the mainstream — and the number of marginal Linux admins has grown — those ideas are suddenly somehow rational.'"

Comments

Hyperviser

[betterunixthanunix]

Someone still has to maintain the machines that are actually running the VMs.

Re:Hyperviser

[causality]

It's VMs all the way down.

Could be. One of my favorite cosmological theories is that our universe is a simulation. In the "real" universe, there's a big computer that has a data object for every elementary particle in our universe. The simulation software (probably massively parallel) "steps" through the simulation, by calculating the position and velocity of each particle after the next time quantum. The beings running the simulation can stop it, do a bit of editing, and restart, which explains the religious "miracles" that have been so often reported.

It's hard to imagine how we could test this hypothesis. If we were to do a successful test, the simulation could just be stopped, reloaded from backup, and edited so our test came out inconclusive.

Of course, if this is valid, then we should also consider that the simulation might itself be running in a simulated universe ...

That's really not too far from Hermetic thought, which is quite ancient. What follows is an oversimplification I hope is still useful. The main difference could just be that they didn't have computers thousands of years ago. Rather than imagining that the simulation is running on a highly advanced computer that's basically a machine of the ultimate sophistication, they conceive the simulation (the "software") to be thoughts in the mind of God. It's also an explanation for how God could be transcendental, beyond the Universe, omniscient and omnipresent, but not some old man in the clouds you could shake hands with like the more childish notions of God.

The Matrix is based on some very old ideas.

I also think it's fascinating to wonder ... if you could see the Universe as a whole, in its entirety, all at once, like perhaps from the perspective of another Universe, what would it look like? Would it look like a single living being, recognizable as such? Would it look sort of like a man even, as in the "we are made in the 'image of God'" idea? What fascinates me about that is the notion of galaxies being like cells in its body, which are made of stars, which have planets, which have organisms, which are made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of subatomic particles, etc, potentially to infinity. It could be infinite both ways, scaling ever smaller and also scaling ever larger. It's like the fractal Universe idea.

That, in turn, reminds me of the holographic Universe idea. It's a notion of such a fractal nature in terms of interrelatedness. It's an analogy for how the "parts contain the whole". Basically, if you take a glass photographic plate and take an ordinary photograph on it, and then break that plate ... you get something like a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece has an incomplete fraction of the total information. If you put a hologram onto a photographic plate and then break that plate into pieces, you get something quite different. You don't get a jigsaw puzzle at all. If it breaks into 10 pieces, then you get 10 complete holograms containing the full information of the original, just with each of them 1/10th the size of the original.

It's like the notion that truly understanding yourself would require truly understanding the Universe. Carl Sagan may or may not have been thinking something like that when he said, "in order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe."

To be honest

[TheRealFixer]

It sounds like this guy is just upset that technology has progressed to the point where we don't need to pay out the nose for some high-priced UNIX consultant to spend 3 days troubleshooting an issue that can be fixed in minutes or hours.

Just because you might learn more by spending days chasing down an issue instead of using your available tools to quickly redeploy the server and get the business back up and running, doesn't make that the correct decision. If you really want dig into the root cause, clone the broken VM off and research it after you get a fresh one deployed from template.