I was just sitting here, looking at some code that I had previously stared at for hours trying to dig out a solution from a nasty mess. It’s relatively old code (> 2 years) that I’ve not dove into for some time, but I felt it necessary to hunt this bug.
As I’m pulling my hair out and repeatedly yelling “Had I wrote this..” in my head, I drifted away for a moment and remembered an old saying I used to tell myself when going off on a wild idea. K.I.S.S.- Keep It Simple Stupid!.
This also applies to system architecture! Why complicate things! There is usually a linear, yet secure, scalable and robust way to do something, hunt it out! Never, never, never setting on your first idea, and never, never, never settle on anything without some sort of peer review. If you work in an environment with smart people, use them!
Ok, done ranting :D Thanks for listening!
I just stumbled onto this promising looking software. We use an awesome distributed configuration engine at the office with similar ideals. Outside of cfengine I really didn’t know anything else existed, and this one is written in python! Let me know if you’ve worked with it, I would love to hear some opinions.
Thanks!
Currently in a session about PyTriton Petabyte File system. Interesting stuff. Tonight we're going to head down to The Ram Bar and check out their brews. I have some pictures of our awesome useless trip downtown last night, but I can't seem to locate an extra usb cord. If anyone has one, look for me, or reply here and let me know!
Tomorrow I think we're going to The Map Room where I'm looking forward to a Black Out Stout!
In the middle of writing this blog I ended up moving next door to the "Python in System Administration", hoping to take a lot away from this.
So, I've noticed lately that one of my more popular blog entries has taken on some spam. I'll work on cleaning that up and implementing countermeasures.
In the mean time... I'm alive! Been working my tail off in preparation for Valentines day at work. It's the busiest time of the year for us. Just got back from VA where another sysadmin and I installed 50 new servers. It went well! Wrote some python to convert my inventory list from csv to our flat file format.
I've also been engineering a new syslogging system for our shop. It's a combination of a shell script that does archiving and checksum accounting, Splunk, and syslog-ng. Good times.
I've also had the (dis)pleasure of building RPM's lately....Not my favorite past-time. I really _really_ wish I could convince our team that the massive undertaking involved in converting from CentOS to debian would be worth it :). Not that I don't like CentOS, but I do love me some Debian.
That's all for now!
