System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.
Julia Evans, who blogs about her programming endeavors, now also draws simple, note-like sketches on a variety of the computer and programming related subjects. Those are great as kick memory refreshers or reminders for “I wanted to learn more about that” kind of things. Here’s her take on pipes, for example:
Worth an RSS subscription!
“S3 static site with SSL and automatic deploys using Travis” is a goldmine of all those simple technologies tied into a single knot for an impressive result. It has a bit of everything:
When put altogether, these bits allow one to have a fast (static content combined with HTTP 2 and top-level networking) and cheap (Jekyll, GitHub, Travis and Let’s Encrypt are free, with the rest of the services costing a few cents here and there) static website, with SSL and HTTP 2.
This is a classic example of how accessible and available is modern technology, if (and only if) you know what you are doing.
Subbu Allamaraju says “Don’t Build Private Clouds“. I agree with his rational.
There are very few enterprises in the planet right now that need to own, operate and automate data centers. Unless you’ve at least 200,000 servers in multiple locations, or you’re in specific technology industries like communications, networking, media delivery, power, etc, you shouldn’t be in the data center and private cloud business. If you’re below this threshold, you should be spending most of your time and effort in getting out of the data center and not on automating and improving your on-premise data center footprint.
His main three points are:
In a comment to another post, Andrey sent in a link to this blog post, titled “Never judge a programmer by their commit history”. It’s very similar to something that I wanted to write for quite some time now.
It’s been a very long time since I judged any programmer based on their commit history and I believe if you think you can judge a programmer’s ability by reading his/her code YOU ARE WRONG.
As technical folk, we are often fast to judge an implementation purely on its technical merits, forgetting, that there are other factors often at play. Mehdi Khalili, the author of the post, goes over just some of them, including:
I’ve seen (and done) almost all of these. Business reality and junior devs are the two I’ve come across the most.
I’ve just upgraded my laptop to Fedora 25. The upgrade process was a breeze (as per instructions from this article):
sudo su - dnf upgrade --refresh dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=25 dnf system-upgrade reboot
About 2,500 packages (1 GB and some) were downloaded in about 40 minutes (yeah, our Internet connection could use a boost). Then rebooted and the upgraded kicked in. It took about another 40 minutes to run the process (I should get myself an SSD-based laptop next time).
The only thing I had to fix after the upgrade was the kmod-wl package, which provides the drivers for my wireless interface. Another reboot later all was good.
There were no major visual changes (I’m using MATE Desktop), but something felt a bit different. After focusing on the differences for a few minutes, I think it’s the fonts. Something is better, sharper, more polished.
Other than that, all is pretty much the same. I’ll need to use it for a while to see if I can spot any changes. Hopefully, at least a flickering issue that I got after some upgrade during the Fedora 24 life span is fixed now. It was weird. A particular application window would start to flick and refresh until clicked again. Never figured out what it was. :)