[nycbug-talk] Hypothetical: the end of the sysadmin/systems engineer/DBA?

[Marc Spitzer]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 8:03 PM, Matt Juszczak <matt at atopia.net> wrote:
>> Your are on point, your reference to the tripwire yellow book is
>> exactly how things are done at my place of employment. One of my
>> primary roles is to migrate our tomcat application from Windows to
>> Linux, I'm in between development and the application support teams.
>> One day, after spending another week troubleshooting an issue that
>> turned out to be a application configuration problem again. I turned
>> to my manager and told him we need to adopt a policy of rebuilding
>> systems rather than troubleshooting. I suggested this because I
>> realize that its difficult to troubleshoot something you don't have
>> control over, when you have another team that insist the issue is on
>> your end and you have to prove them wrong before they take a closer
>> look at their configs.
>
> I agree and disagree with this.  I think anything at this point that isn't
> standardized should be rebuilt in general into a standardized setup (puppet,
> openldap, centralized DNS, etc.).  But then, rebuilding is easy - you just
> install a new instance, launch it, and have puppet configure it.
>
> Are you saying that if one tiny thing breaks, you rebuild the whole instance
> anyway?  Or are you saying that if something major breaks, and the box
> becomes too unmanageable?

go read the little yellow book, it explains it.  first troubleshooting
step is reinstall the box and see if that works.  It is a short book
that tripwire will send you fro free.

>
>> You also mentioned project management and writing, you are absolutely
>> right about that as well. One thing I've realized since working as a
>> sysadmin is, you don't come across developers or support personnel who
>> understands infrastructure or understands something simple as how the
>> OS you are running boots. My writing skills sucks, and my project
>> management is improving. The little I know of both has helped me deal
>> with these two groups of people which lead to us "Solving hard
>> business oriented problems". I've also noticed some people in IT just
>> stopped learning, and sadly some of these people are now managers, so
>> knowing how to articulate something in writing can take you a long
>> way.
>
> The latter is quite sad actually =(

it makes me money.

marc



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