Sounds too lean to me. But, then, one has to consider a few other things: number of physical locations (and, thus, number of wide area links), distance between locations, degree of regulatory oversight (and thus, number of audits and paperwork associated with them), gigabytes of data backed up per day, and a few other things. As I've mentioned elsewhere, having adequate staffing is an investment the company makes in its technology engine. A little too much is better than a bit too little where business continuation is concerned. One always has to consider what the impact of something like a virus hit, a flood, or a fire would be. A two- or three-man team handling 250 workstations and 30 servers sounds like a recipe for a poorly documented operation and lots of pain when the inevitable bad day comes. Not much room in there for continuing education, either. YMMV.
Your execs are shortsighted individuals, to put it charitably, if they haven't thought about what would happen if you became gravely ill or seriously disgusted and disappeared for a while - - or permanently. Management succession is an important part of business strategy. The last thing a rising company wants to see is progress undone as a key player leaves, taking vital knowledge with him. I've seen it happen many times, and the setbacks can reverberate through a business for months. Backups aren't just for data. This can be seen as lessening your value in the operation, but eventually you'll burn out. And that doesn't look good to anyone.
1) Apply this patch only if all criteria are met
2) Apply this firmware/bios update only if there is a specific need for it in your system.
3) The default kernel is fine for most applications.
4) Leave well enough alone.
5) It can wait until Monday.
iPods, and all things related to them, will become boring and possibly extinct in the time it took to:
- Lose my Palm Pilot and decide it wasn't worth finding;
- Lose my thumb drive, and pray that nobody intelligent found it;
- Recover from a case of intestinal gas;
- Install XFree86 from source code;
- Put down a sixpack;
- Configure a wireless connection in Linux;
- Remember my GPG key password;
- Find Cowboy Neal's number in the phonebook.
I brought Linux to my Microsoft-entrenched company six years ago and it's doing some good things for us on the server side. LAMP, in particular, has been a winner. Experiments on the desktop, however, were not particularly encouraging. Let's just say that people are creatures of habit. There need to be many good reasons for forcing them to use new desktop environments, a new browser, etc.
But the really, really big issue that people on the IT side of the equation need to consider is this: how deep is their sysadmin bench? Do they have only one superstar surrounded by Unix newbies? What I'm saying is that you want to avoid being the only person, or one of very few, who can manage your shiny new *nix network confidently and competently. Keep in mind that people take vacations, people get sick, people quit, they get fired, and so on. With Windows, pulling in some extra help for a day or two using a temp service - - in my area, anyway - - is no problem. But if you and, say, one or two enthusiasts are all you have on the Linux team and you expect most of the support to come from the Web, USENET groups, and old copies of Linux Journal, ask yourself how much fun it's going to be when you have the inevitable disaster, or you just want to take some vacation. I learned this the hard way and am now trying to build up some Linux competency in our tech department. Even though the attitude has been good and the spirit willing, it's slow going when you have to teach people 75 percent of the material (a lot of people don't like to read, you know?). As much as it is criticized, Microsoft support has gotten me out of several scrapes when I didn't have time to dig up the answer on my own. Who will give you priority when a critical service on your Linux network chokes? My best advice is that you think more about how to maintain the network than how to roll it out.
Amen, brother.
When my dad was about to leave, having helped me move into my freshman dorm room, he turned and said that I would never again have so much freedom and so little responsibility - - so study hard and have fun. Twenty-five years later, I reflect on that comment and realize that he was on target. Direct hit. What a privilege it is to attend college as a resident student. It should be appreciated as such, but often - - as in my case - - students are too young from a maturation standpoint to realize the extent of their good fortune. Regardless, even a mediocre performance pays dividends as long as it carries one through to graduation day. Sometimes, I feel greater sympathy for those who drop out than those who never attend at all.
I can slap Linux and open source applications on as many workstations, appliances, and servers as I like, and I don't have to keep records about what I've installed versus what I've paid for. Anyone who has been through a software audit at work knows what I mean. I like that so much of the software is simple and stable. Even my Windows-oriented colleagues have become believers having seen the reliability of our LAMP servers. Computing without fear of viruses is a plus. And I've become so partial to Firefox on KDE in the last couple of years that I can hardly stand using anything else.
Clusters have a reputation for needing a lot of upkeep. Windows dudes say that Microsoft clusters are a royal pain to maintain. Fault-tolerance in servers, on the other hand, is known by almost everyone to be a good or excellent investment, regardless of the OS platform. If you have a hard time holding onto admins for more than a couple of years, you'd have to consider whether clustering is a good choice. But then, I come from a network of only 275 users. Still, we've never considered clusters. Redundancy is were we put our money.
Yep, I'm 42, and I've seen it play out pretty much this way many, many times. I was a left-winger when I was 25. Now, I call myself a moderate conservative. Things change as you get older. I now understand why the "Leave it to Beaver" version of the American Dream is not entirely ridiculous. Assuming dad (or mom) makes enough bank so that the spouse can be at home with junior and muffy, that is . . . .
Not defending Microsoft here, but I have to take care of an Exchange 2003 Enterprise server, and I wouldn't think of trying to do it without Symantec (formerly Veritas) Backup Exec with the additional Exchange agent. Yes, you can back up and restore individual mailboxes, and even individual messages. Backup Exec has its quirks, but it's the best thing going if you have to take care of Outlook users. Over the years, starting with Exchange 5.5, Backup Exec has saved my rear when information stores got corrupted, log files were deleted accidently, and so on. Combined with a nice, fast AIT tape library, it's a great data preseration product for the small- to medium-size enterprise.
Wow - - that's going to be a very nice box. I don't know if it has all the space you want, but I went with the BEAUTIFUL black aluminum case from Silverstone http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-tj06.htm. This is the fourth case I've bought from Silverstone, and, like all the others, it's simply a pleasure to work with. Great machining and finish, unusually well engineered. Doesn't hurt that they're nice on the eyes, too. I used Lian-Li aluminum drive drawers to finish it off. My drives are 250G Seagate 7200 rpm units.
Well, if you buy a real RAID5-capable card - - one that does the command processing - - SATA is a great foundation for print, file, and web servers. Take the current line of 3Ware SATA controllers, for instance. With an 8-port card, you can set up a mirror for your OS and have 6 slots left for a good RAID5 setup. Add hot-swap drawers and you can build yourself a mighty fast terrabyte of storage with excellent fault tolerance, and you can do it quite cheaply. Use 5 drives for the RAID5 and you can use that last port for a BIG drive that can be used for quick backups to disk (in addition to tape, of course). I'm sold on SATA for applications that don't absolutely demand SCSI performance and features.
. . . . and then they can make a movie from the video game.
Let's see, how about . . . . "The Spaminator"? The mechanoid (or some such thing - - I don't watch much Sci-Fi) comes back from, ummm, having just been in 1982, where he sees that the spammers will destroy the Internet. So then, he jumps to 2005 and . ... Well, hell, I have no imagination, but you get the idea.
But who cares whether the drive is able to hold data? We're talking visual arts here, man! If you want to talk about function and whatnot, go be a scientist or something.
Remove the cover from the drive so that you can see the platter. Paint a groovy spiral on the mirror surface of the platter. Fire up the drive. Oooooh, ahhhhhh. Now THAT would be art.
Care for an IT Manager's Point of View?
on
LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2
·
· Score: 1
Okay, I've had to hire a few admins, and here's my point of view with regard to certifications:
If you seek out people with certifications, you're going to get boatloads of resumes from people who have certs and no experience. If you're looking for cheap bodies and like to train greenhorns, this can be an effective way to build a decent staff in a hurry. But you can be sure that, unless you pay competitively, these people will leave you within two years, three at the max.
Experienced people who are informed that they must pass one or more certification exams are interesting to watch. The ones who take the tests seriously tend to pass with high scores - - although there occasionally are surprises even for these people. But the ones who don't bother to try a practice exam before going to the test booth quite often don't want to talk about their experience afterwards, especially if they have to pay for anything beyond one attempt. This is something I've seen several times. My point is that the exams concocted by the big vendors - - i.e., Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. - - can be eye poppers if you don't get yourself into the right frame of mind before you go for the exam. The people who are the most disparaging of certifications are typically people who have never sat for - - or passed - - a certification exam. I went through the MCSE in the early days of NT4, and despite the fact that I'd worked for years with Unix-style networking, both serial and TCP/IP, I found that passing those exams required some studying.
I work in a tightly regulated non-profit industry and management is required to host periodic 3rd-party assessments of IT. So no matter what executive management thinks of me - - and they've always treated me well - - I have to be subjected to this, at varying levels of intensity, at least annually. This year, it will happen three times. I'm not sure why. Possibly because we have a rather aggressive new crop of execs.
Truly, if you're into function over form, the Win2K interface is far more refined than the prettier, but painfully illogical backwards step that became XP. I am amazed, yet not surprised, at the number of people who are barely competent enough to create a desktop icon, but manage to figure out how to return to the "classic" style. I hope the next Windows interface will be a return to crisp function and logical work flow.
"They, too, like to keep their skills well-honed and take on interesting and high-profile projects. But those very characteristics of I.T. jobs may be the ones that finally push them out of the field -- and they are leaving, voluntarily, in droves."
Okay - - so leave already. I hate this kind of touchy-feely pseudojournalism. There's an old saying: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." That's the only story here, and it's hardly newsworthy. It's a tough field. If you can't handle it, do something else. That goes for the guys, too.
>>Then we have things such as Exchange, which at first everyone will swear that they need because it has integrated scheduling functions, despite the fact that most corporations hardly ever use the functionality, except for one or two very annoying people who are quickly ignored by everyone else (if you are one of those people, think of that statement as humor). Here is where the price starts getting steep.
I wonder how you could come to this conclusion, but must assume you haven't been around many medium- to large corporate Windows networks. I have, and let me tell you - - scheduling in Outlook, not only for meetings, but also for resources (like conference rooms) and employee vacations, training, etc., was one of the most heavily used feature sets in Exchange. Many companies and small offices rely on the free/busy scheduling facility so much that all employees are REQUIRED to keep their calendars up to date so that management will know the availablity of any colleague at a glance. And I can assure you that, if it weren't for this functionality in Exchange, OSS mail and calendar software would have penetrated much more deeply into corporate American than it has thus far. I've been able to bring Apache, PHP, and MySQL to my current employer's server room, but they will NEVER break away from Outlook/Exchange in the course of my career, I'm sure.
You know, that old Zilog chip never let me down back in the days of LS-DOS, SuperScripsit, and BCX. It warms my heart to know that it's still crunching bits and bytes. I knew I shouldn't have tossed my last TRS-80 a few months ago . . . .
Ever thought about what you could do with the forced hot water heating system in your house??? The typical 1800-square-foot house probably has, what, a dozen radiator units or so? My god, you could probably run a Z-80 at 36 Mhz with such a thing!
I've been a Linux desktop guy for almost 10 years, and I've worked my way through a few different distributions. While I'm willing to do what it takes to get up and running, I do not for one second think even two percent of Windows users could be bothered to work out the kinks - - even assuming they had a clue as to how to go about it. I'll give you one example related to SuSE 9.1: the SNAFU that is the new "subfs" mounting system. It just doesn't work, so the user has no clue how to mount a floppy disk, cdrom, etc. If you go to the SuSE knowledge base, you can eventually find your way to an entry concerning/etc/fstab wizardry. As long as highly rated Linux distros ship with such oversights (or idiocy, if you like), Linux as a mainstream desktop hasn't a chance. Do we even need to talk about the state of media players in Linux? The road ahead is long, and the prospects for widespread adoption in developed countries are dim at best.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds too lean to me. But, then, one has to consider a few other things: number of physical locations (and, thus, number of wide area links), distance between locations, degree of regulatory oversight (and thus, number of audits and paperwork associated with them), gigabytes of data backed up per day, and a few other things. As I've mentioned elsewhere, having adequate staffing is an investment the company makes in its technology engine. A little too much is better than a bit too little where business continuation is concerned. One always has to consider what the impact of something like a virus hit, a flood, or a fire would be. A two- or three-man team handling 250 workstations and 30 servers sounds like a recipe for a poorly documented operation and lots of pain when the inevitable bad day comes. Not much room in there for continuing education, either. YMMV.
Your execs are shortsighted individuals, to put it charitably, if they haven't thought about what would happen if you became gravely ill or seriously disgusted and disappeared for a while - - or permanently. Management succession is an important part of business strategy. The last thing a rising company wants to see is progress undone as a key player leaves, taking vital knowledge with him. I've seen it happen many times, and the setbacks can reverberate through a business for months. Backups aren't just for data. This can be seen as lessening your value in the operation, but eventually you'll burn out. And that doesn't look good to anyone.
1) Apply this patch only if all criteria are met
2) Apply this firmware/bios update only if there is a specific need for it in your system.
3) The default kernel is fine for most applications.
4) Leave well enough alone.
5) It can wait until Monday.
Heh heh - - I'm with you, Dood. We need to start a Wiki (WikIPod?), too, if we're going to do this right.
iPods, and all things related to them, will become boring and possibly extinct in the time it took to:
- Lose my Palm Pilot and decide it wasn't worth finding;
- Lose my thumb drive, and pray that nobody intelligent found it;
- Recover from a case of intestinal gas;
- Install XFree86 from source code;
- Put down a sixpack;
- Configure a wireless connection in Linux;
- Remember my GPG key password;
- Find Cowboy Neal's number in the phonebook.
I brought Linux to my Microsoft-entrenched company six years ago and it's doing some good things for us on the server side. LAMP, in particular, has been a winner. Experiments on the desktop, however, were not particularly encouraging. Let's just say that people are creatures of habit. There need to be many good reasons for forcing them to use new desktop environments, a new browser, etc.
But the really, really big issue that people on the IT side of the equation need to consider is this: how deep is their sysadmin bench? Do they have only one superstar surrounded by Unix newbies? What I'm saying is that you want to avoid being the only person, or one of very few, who can manage your shiny new *nix network confidently and competently. Keep in mind that people take vacations, people get sick, people quit, they get fired, and so on. With Windows, pulling in some extra help for a day or two using a temp service - - in my area, anyway - - is no problem. But if you and, say, one or two enthusiasts are all you have on the Linux team and you expect most of the support to come from the Web, USENET groups, and old copies of Linux Journal, ask yourself how much fun it's going to be when you have the inevitable disaster, or you just want to take some vacation. I learned this the hard way and am now trying to build up some Linux competency in our tech department. Even though the attitude has been good and the spirit willing, it's slow going when you have to teach people 75 percent of the material (a lot of people don't like to read, you know?). As much as it is criticized, Microsoft support has gotten me out of several scrapes when I didn't have time to dig up the answer on my own. Who will give you priority when a critical service on your Linux network chokes? My best advice is that you think more about how to maintain the network than how to roll it out.
Amen, brother. When my dad was about to leave, having helped me move into my freshman dorm room, he turned and said that I would never again have so much freedom and so little responsibility - - so study hard and have fun. Twenty-five years later, I reflect on that comment and realize that he was on target. Direct hit. What a privilege it is to attend college as a resident student. It should be appreciated as such, but often - - as in my case - - students are too young from a maturation standpoint to realize the extent of their good fortune. Regardless, even a mediocre performance pays dividends as long as it carries one through to graduation day. Sometimes, I feel greater sympathy for those who drop out than those who never attend at all.
I can slap Linux and open source applications on as many workstations, appliances, and servers as I like, and I don't have to keep records about what I've installed versus what I've paid for. Anyone who has been through a software audit at work knows what I mean. I like that so much of the software is simple and stable. Even my Windows-oriented colleagues have become believers having seen the reliability of our LAMP servers. Computing without fear of viruses is a plus. And I've become so partial to Firefox on KDE in the last couple of years that I can hardly stand using anything else.
Clusters have a reputation for needing a lot of upkeep. Windows dudes say that Microsoft clusters are a royal pain to maintain. Fault-tolerance in servers, on the other hand, is known by almost everyone to be a good or excellent investment, regardless of the OS platform. If you have a hard time holding onto admins for more than a couple of years, you'd have to consider whether clustering is a good choice. But then, I come from a network of only 275 users. Still, we've never considered clusters. Redundancy is were we put our money.
Yep, I'm 42, and I've seen it play out pretty much this way many, many times. I was a left-winger when I was 25. Now, I call myself a moderate conservative. Things change as you get older. I now understand why the "Leave it to Beaver" version of the American Dream is not entirely ridiculous. Assuming dad (or mom) makes enough bank so that the spouse can be at home with junior and muffy, that is . . . .
Not defending Microsoft here, but I have to take care of an Exchange 2003 Enterprise server, and I wouldn't think of trying to do it without Symantec (formerly Veritas) Backup Exec with the additional Exchange agent. Yes, you can back up and restore individual mailboxes, and even individual messages. Backup Exec has its quirks, but it's the best thing going if you have to take care of Outlook users. Over the years, starting with Exchange 5.5, Backup Exec has saved my rear when information stores got corrupted, log files were deleted accidently, and so on. Combined with a nice, fast AIT tape library, it's a great data preseration product for the small- to medium-size enterprise.
Wow - - that's going to be a very nice box. I don't know if it has all the space you want, but I went with the BEAUTIFUL black aluminum case from Silverstone http://www.silverstonetek.com/products-tj06.htm. This is the fourth case I've bought from Silverstone, and, like all the others, it's simply a pleasure to work with. Great machining and finish, unusually well engineered. Doesn't hurt that they're nice on the eyes, too. I used Lian-Li aluminum drive drawers to finish it off. My drives are 250G Seagate 7200 rpm units.
Well, if you buy a real RAID5-capable card - - one that does the command processing - - SATA is a great foundation for print, file, and web servers. Take the current line of 3Ware SATA controllers, for instance. With an 8-port card, you can set up a mirror for your OS and have 6 slots left for a good RAID5 setup. Add hot-swap drawers and you can build yourself a mighty fast terrabyte of storage with excellent fault tolerance, and you can do it quite cheaply. Use 5 drives for the RAID5 and you can use that last port for a BIG drive that can be used for quick backups to disk (in addition to tape, of course). I'm sold on SATA for applications that don't absolutely demand SCSI performance and features.
. . . . and then they can make a movie from the video game.
Let's see, how about . . . . "The Spaminator"? The mechanoid (or some such thing - - I don't watch much Sci-Fi) comes back from, ummm, having just been in 1982, where he sees that the spammers will destroy the Internet. So then, he jumps to 2005 and . .
But who cares whether the drive is able to hold data? We're talking visual arts here, man! If you want to talk about function and whatnot, go be a scientist or something.
Remove the cover from the drive so that you can see the platter. Paint a groovy spiral on the mirror surface of the platter. Fire up the drive. Oooooh, ahhhhhh. Now THAT would be art.
Okay, I've had to hire a few admins, and here's my point of view with regard to certifications:
If you seek out people with certifications, you're going to get boatloads of resumes from people who have certs and no experience. If you're looking for cheap bodies and like to train greenhorns, this can be an effective way to build a decent staff in a hurry. But you can be sure that, unless you pay competitively, these people will leave you within two years, three at the max.
Experienced people who are informed that they must pass one or more certification exams are interesting to watch. The ones who take the tests seriously tend to pass with high scores - - although there occasionally are surprises even for these people. But the ones who don't bother to try a practice exam before going to the test booth quite often don't want to talk about their experience afterwards, especially if they have to pay for anything beyond one attempt. This is something I've seen several times. My point is that the exams concocted by the big vendors - - i.e., Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, etc. - - can be eye poppers if you don't get yourself into the right frame of mind before you go for the exam. The people who are the most disparaging of certifications are typically people who have never sat for - - or passed - - a certification exam. I went through the MCSE in the early days of NT4, and despite the fact that I'd worked for years with Unix-style networking, both serial and TCP/IP, I found that passing those exams required some studying.
I work in a tightly regulated non-profit industry and management is required to host periodic 3rd-party assessments of IT. So no matter what executive management thinks of me - - and they've always treated me well - - I have to be subjected to this, at varying levels of intensity, at least annually. This year, it will happen three times. I'm not sure why. Possibly because we have a rather aggressive new crop of execs.
Truly, if you're into function over form, the Win2K interface is far more refined than the prettier, but painfully illogical backwards step that became XP. I am amazed, yet not surprised, at the number of people who are barely competent enough to create a desktop icon, but manage to figure out how to return to the "classic" style. I hope the next Windows interface will be a return to crisp function and logical work flow.
What vague garbage is this?:
"They, too, like to keep their skills well-honed and take on interesting and high-profile projects. But those very characteristics of I.T. jobs may be the ones that finally push them out of the field -- and they are leaving, voluntarily, in droves."
Okay - - so leave already. I hate this kind of touchy-feely pseudojournalism. There's an old saying: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." That's the only story here, and it's hardly newsworthy. It's a tough field. If you can't handle it, do something else. That goes for the guys, too.
>>Then we have things such as Exchange, which at first everyone will swear that they need because it has integrated scheduling functions, despite the fact that most corporations hardly ever use the functionality, except for one or two very annoying people who are quickly ignored by everyone else (if you are one of those people, think of that statement as humor). Here is where the price starts getting steep.
I wonder how you could come to this conclusion, but must assume you haven't been around many medium- to large corporate Windows networks. I have, and let me tell you - - scheduling in Outlook, not only for meetings, but also for resources (like conference rooms) and employee vacations, training, etc., was one of the most heavily used feature sets in Exchange. Many companies and small offices rely on the free/busy scheduling facility so much that all employees are REQUIRED to keep their calendars up to date so that management will know the availablity of any colleague at a glance. And I can assure you that, if it weren't for this functionality in Exchange, OSS mail and calendar software would have penetrated much more deeply into corporate American than it has thus far. I've been able to bring Apache, PHP, and MySQL to my current employer's server room, but they will NEVER break away from Outlook/Exchange in the course of my career, I'm sure.
You know, that old Zilog chip never let me down back in the days of LS-DOS, SuperScripsit, and BCX. It warms my heart to know that it's still crunching bits and bytes. I knew I shouldn't have tossed my last TRS-80 a few months ago . . . .
Ever thought about what you could do with the forced hot water heating system in your house??? The typical 1800-square-foot house probably has, what, a dozen radiator units or so? My god, you could probably run a Z-80 at 36 Mhz with such a thing!
I've been a Linux desktop guy for almost 10 years, and I've worked my way through a few different distributions. While I'm willing to do what it takes to get up and running, I do not for one second think even two percent of Windows users could be bothered to work out the kinks - - even assuming they had a clue as to how to go about it. I'll give you one example related to SuSE 9.1: the SNAFU that is the new "subfs" mounting system. It just doesn't work, so the user has no clue how to mount a floppy disk, cdrom, etc. If you go to the SuSE knowledge base, you can eventually find your way to an entry concerning
Thanks for that info - - could be useful to my web developer right now.