On Oct 30, 2006, at 22:10 , Luke Kanies wrote:
Luke Crawford wrote:
Most of the places I have worked, most of the 'fires' were caused
by an admin mistake.
Even now that my job is to put out other people's fires,
configuration errors are close to half the problems I encounter.
If your sysadmins are still logging into machines and making manual
changes, or they've got a bunch of hand-rolled scripts that do who-
knows-what and aren't centrally version controlled, it's no wonder
that there are so many bugs. If you are using current best
practice and you're still having lots of problems, your admins are
incompetent and should be fired.
"Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence." We've
had a few instances of changes being tested and rolled out via CM,
and breaking a significant number of machines because the testing
missed some corner cases. The automated tools can actually make this
worse by turning it into a global meltdown.
Sysadmins are human, and CM tools are only as good as the humans
using them.
(This does not mean don't use them, but it does go along with
starting small so the inevitable mistakes while learning are
localized. You're far more likely to cause a global meltdown with
cfengine etc. if you're a novice jumping in with both feet.)
--
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
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