City of Motors

Tuesday afternoon:

And I hear a rumbling
I hear transmission grind
I bear witness
I have the clutch now...

"City of Motors", Soul Coughing

Tuesday afternoon was another Tom Limoncelli class for me: "Design Patterns for System Administrators". I think of design patterns as being a step above algorithms in the abstraction scale. (Tom told us that the term was first used in architecture and city planning; I need to add the titles for the books and maybe look them up too.) DP was a way of capturing passive knowledge: the knowledge you only get from experience.

The course was interesting, and I will be keeping the slides handy for future reference. It was also crowded -- there was not a free seat in the house. However, some of the material was already familiar from Tom's books, and some of it just did not apply to me because it was aimed at much bigger departments.

At the break I talked with Ludmilla, who managed to cram into my brain a better understanding of cross-site scripting attacks; this has always been a mysterious subject to me.

Stopped by the LOPSA desk to ask if they'd be interested in helping me at all with my (still vague and nebulous) sysadmin conference for Vancouver. They pinged the IRC channel (horrible mix of metaphors) and said sure, send an email. We talked about some upcoming changes on the LOPSA website, and I suggested sending a feed to planetsysadmin.com

For supper I headed out to a nice Italian restaurant with a few folks. I heard complaints about Red Hat support; an upgrade from RHEL 4 to RHEL 5 produced massive disk corruption on their SAN. Red Hat and the disk vendor pointed their fingers at each other for a year. Finally the disk vendor came out with a beta/testing firmware upgrade, which fixed the problem, but a final release has not come out yet. He's left deeply unimpressed with RHEL support: they were paying buckets of money and were left in the lurch. And I've heard that from a number of people here.

We got back late, so we hung out in the hallways talking to folks. I ended up talking to a sysadmin from the University of Alberta who, it turns out, can practically touch the OpenBSD FTP server from his desk. He talked about a move on the campus to switch to Google Mail for the entire university.

This was controversial a while back, when Lakehead University in Ontario tried it; one of the groups on campus (teacher's union?) sued because they said it violated privacy restrictions to place their email w/in reach of the Patriot Act. So I was surprised to hear that they were giving it another try. THere were two things that made this a not-wasted effort: first, apparently Ontario's privacy commissioner had ruled that email is just not private, so it was okay. The second is that UofA has invited the Alberta privacy commissioner to participate, so they're hoping to avoid any problems from the start.

So why are they doing it? First off it's free; Google gives it away to universities. Second, there are something like thirty separate email systems at UofA and no unified calendaring system. These are good things but it's interesting to hear of a university-wide concern about this; UBC is balkanized/decentralized to the point that implementing a campus-wide system like this would be pretty much a non-starter.

After a while I headed up to the LOPSA suite. One of the members said, "Hey, are you the Vancouver guy interested in starting a convention there? How would one or two speakers work?" Cazart! I made it clear that it's still in my head and I don't know what I'm doing...but OTOH a recent IT re-organization at UBC means that HR there is interested in making a clear career path for IT folks there, both in the central department and the individual faculties, so they may be interested in helping with this. And of course, university == cheap space in the summer. Anyhow, it's all early days and I still need to email them to remind them, but still...woot!

And then there was the guy who drove five hours after a regular workday to get to LISA. He'd come up on his own dime to organize a BOF but more importantly to make contacts; he's unhappy at his current job and wants to jump ship. "Man, I'm gonna stay here as long as it takes and if I gotta drive all night to get back at 9am, I'm doing it."

Well, I'm here to tell you that within THREE MINUTES he had two different guys fighting over him ("What's your specialty?...Damn! Yeah, talk to that guy...dammit, dammit dammit...") It was the feelgood story of the evening, and he was a damn friendly guy to boot. And when I left for the night, he was talking to Bill Lefebvre ("Hey, do you know who this guy is? He wrote top!").

I worked my magic (hot-cha!) throughout the night; persuaded Matt (almost) to join the FSF, and one of the 8 Norwegian sysadmin's I've met to join LOPSA (on sale! $10 off the rest of the week!). I asked Tom Limoncelli about my idea for training on "The n things a sysadmin must know about development"; he thought it was a good idea, suggested I look at the open-source tools that exist to help w/the situations I described, mentioned that Strata Rose-Chalup had pitched a book about this (but sadly the deal fell through), and suggested I get experience doing training, and doing training on this, by volunteering at my local LUG.

Finally, I spent a good bunch of time -- in both senses -- talking to a manager about what the appeal of the job was for him. He confirmed what the tutorial instructor had said: it is really, really neat to help people improve, to make the environment that allows them to do that and keeps them happy, and to see them get better and climb the ladder. It's not always easy and there are not-fun, difficult decisions to make, but the rewards are there.

I asked him if he'd always known he'd want to climb the ladder, or if this was something he found out later on. He thought a bit, and said that when he was younger he'd had a false sense of what was important; that not having a family had allowed him to fucus on tech fun to the exclusion of all else. Now that he was older and had kids, the long nights spent on tech was shifted to family, and his focus had switched to helping his team -- which was much more rewarding.