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Submission + - Defining DevOps (standalone-sysadmin.com)

Bandman writes: DevOps is a trend that has been taking the sysadmin world by storm. The idea of co-mingling sysadmins and develops sounds foreign to too many people (and sounds old-hat to others), but like it or not, the movement has a big foothold.

The author attempts to sow seeds of understanding with a standard definition, stripped of all the "touchy-feely stuff": "DevOps is an increased interaction and interdependency between developers and operations staff"

Comment Re:The answer is google (Score 1) 4

That is an interesting idea.

I am worried, though, about the quality of online-only docs. I mean, I'm one of those sick people who actually /likes/ to write documentation, and even I don't like documenting the boring stuff...but if you get a good book, that's exactly what you'll get. The boring stuff is documented in as much detail as the exciting stuff, and sometimes it's the boring stuff that's going to save you in a corner case.

I might be wrong, and I hope I am.

Books

Submission + - Why don't we buy sysadmin books anymore? (standalone-sysadmin.com) 4

Bandman writes: Our needs for good information and documentation have not changed, but the way that we get it has. The ebook revolution has made physical shelves of sysadmin books endangered species. A bigger issue may be that even ebook sales of books related to system administration have not been selling. Somewhere along the line, people stopped buying things like "DNS and Bind" or "Sed & Awk".

Has our need for documentation changed, or just our sources of it?

Submission + - Power Outage: A true test for Ganeti (lancealbertson.com)

JerseyTom writes: Ganeti is open source virtualization's biggest secret. Migrate a running VM from one physical machine to another is easy with Ganeti. It scales bigger with each release. Ganeti 2.x is plug-in based and includes plugins that lets you manage Xen or KVM VMs; storage plugins include DRBD, and flat-file (no SAN required!). More plug-ins on their way. A small but growing community is starting to use Ganeti for more and more advanced projects. Lance Albertson recently reported his Ganeti success story; after a power outage he watched "this system recover everything automatically".

Submission + - XenClient: User Review (standalone-sysadmin.com)

Bandman writes: Last week was Synergy, and annual product annoucement / cheerleading session from Citrix. At Synergy, Citrix announced XenClient, the next logical step in the progression of desktop virtualization, namely a bare metal hypervisor designed to run on end-user laptops.

Blogger Matt Simmons grabbed a spare laptop and spent some time playing. He shared his thoughts (and pictures) of the process.

Comment Re:Food? (Score 1) 640

You can't just compare like that. You've got to look at volume.

For instance, you say cow farts are "natural" sources. Natural how? As in, because they're produced by animals? How would you explain the unnatural population of animals that we've bred into being, solely for consumption? All of those extra animals contribute, too, but can't be considered "natural", at least in the way you were meaning it.

The truth is that there is not, never was, and can't be, a single canonical "right" amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're living in a world that changes drastically over the course of 10,000 years. Millions of years ago, insects were the size of us, just because of a _slight_ change in the O2 percentage in the atmosphere. Was that wrong? Or was that right? How about a few millions of years before that, when CO2 was king, and plants evolved because it was the most plentiful, and they exuded a caustic gas, O2?

This biosphere adapts. The animals (including us) come and go, and change and adapt to the circumstances of thousands and millions of years, but there's no "wrong" or "right", there's only "right now".

Now, you could argue from the point of view that since we're the dominant form of life, most intelligent, and technologically advanced, we have a sort of noblesse oblige to "fix" things. Especially since there's evidence that we "broke" them.

There's a sort of universal guilt among the ecologically-friendly people that attempts to repent for their lifestyle. "Carbon credits", for one. Buying organic food, for another. People feel guilty for their "footprint" and try to buy the new age equivalent of indulgences. "I fly a lot, so I buy carbon credits". Great. I mean, not as good as not flying, but at least you feel better about yourself. "I buy organic because pesticides hurt the environment". Awesome. Unfortunately, you had to work nearly twice as much to pay for those organic foods, not to mention that it's unbelievably inefficient, and much more susceptible to disease than the cheaper, prettier, just-as-healthy food 20 feet down the row at the grocery store.

We need to get past the guilt for breaking our planet, because we haven't. It isn't broken. We might have changed our planet, but it's not broken. As soon as we change the terminology, we can stop focusing on the guilt, and start focusing on what's really happening. We want to change the planet again, but in the other direction. We want to change it, because it's going to be more comfortable for us like that. It's what we're used to. It's how we like it, and we (might) have the technology to do it. So stop concentrating on guilt, and start concentrating on the real goal. We're being selfish, by trying to adjust the planet for our own gain, and there's nothing wrong with that. We've been doing it ever since we killed the first snakes that lived under the rocks we were moved when we built the first house. It's only a matter of scale.

Submission + - Dell Removes (then reinstates) 3rd Party Drive Sup (standalone-sysadmin.com)

Bandman writes: Back in February, a posting by Dell rep Howard Shoobe alerted us to the fact that Dell was removing the ability to use non-Dell branded drives in the Poweredge server line, when configured with the PERC H700/H800. There was immediate backlash.

Recently, however, Dell backpedaled on their stance, saying that third party drives would be able to be used, but not officially supported. This much more agreeable stance was brought about by the thousands of Dell customers who railed against the change. The news is that, apparently, Dell listens.

Submission + - DevOps: Sysadmin meet Developer and Vice-Versa (zenoss.org) 1

socialized writes: DevOps, also referred to as agile systems administration, is a big part of how Kris Buytaert, a Senior Linux and Open Source Consultant with the Belgian firm Inuits who, likes to create opens source apps for business. Buytaert describes himself as a developer who "then became an Op" and as such, began to see the challenges facing both sides of the application deployment process. The 451 Group also has recently noted this phenomenon as have may others (Stephen Nelson-Smith, Jake Sorofman) .There's even a series of Devops Days internationally and OpsCamp is running DevOps styleunconferences for cloud computing (Devops.Info lists even more self-organizing conferences). How many systems administrators consider themselves part developers and how many developers consider their operations knowledge a critical to their ability to create software?

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