williamhathaway.com

Here are a couple of systems tools I’ve been using lately and have been very happy with:

Puppet (configuration management) – I’ve used CFengine a lot on the past for configuration management, but I now prefer Puppet due to its wide scope of manageable resources, ranging the gamut from standard file distribution to  packages, services, users, network configurations, etc.   We are currently using Puppet to bootstrap systems from a base CentOS image to having all the components needed for their role and it is working out really well. I read the book Pulling String with Puppet to get ramped up, and while it is helpful, it lacks an index, so I’d recommend getting an electronic copy.

Splunk (log/event parsing) – I haven’t seen any other locally deployed tool that can come anywhere close to Splunk for taking various log files and making the information immediately usable on a wide scale.  The search interface is super shiny and has a lot of very interesting capabilities for creating dashboard, performing data mining, and alerting.  Splunk came out with a new release (4.1) last week.  If you last looked at Splunk more than a year ago, check out whats new.  If you are looking for a cloud-based solution, Paglo (recently bought by Citrix)seems to be an interesting option.

Func (command & control) – while almost all of the management in the environment is done via Puppet, there are times when we want to run commands across a set of hosts. Func fills the niche nicely by providing the ability to use wildcards and grouping for host selection and running against multiple targets in parallel.  For folks wanting to get a quick overview of Func, I recommend Dan Hank’s Managing Your Minions With Func presentation

While flipping through the Oracle presentations about the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, I came across some examples of meaningless clip-art. I know not everyone can have Steve Jobs’ level of presentation slickness, but it seems really odd to me that someone actually thought: “You know what will help get our message across?  An image of two golden stick figures with a huge measuring tape.” or “A stick figure with a huge paint roller really brings home our point!”.

If this was some local presentation I wouldn’t have been too surprised, but this was  during a presentation on how Oracle will manage their $7 billion acquisition.  This scenario is definitely one where you want to be bringing your communication “A game”.  The weird thing was that I only see this type of clutter on one of the seven presentations.

I’d recommend that whoever is in charge of creating the slides get a copy of Presentation Zen or similar books.

Photo by John @ ThinkHole.com

On Tuesday night I gave a presentation on ZFS to the Central PA Linux User Group. Since the audience was a Linux user group, I wasn’t expecting too many in the crowd to be familiar with ZFS, but I was pleasantly surprised that about 40% of the ~ 20 people in attendance had used ZFS in some capacity. If you are already a seasoned ZFS user, I would highly recommend Richard Elling’s ZFS presentation which he uses in his day-long tutorials.

I was just reading a presentation on SSD performance for PostgreSQL and came across a graph that made my head spin

If you eyeball it, it appears that the hard disk drive (HDD) is roughly 40% as fast as the solid state disk (SSD) for a specific test.  The presentation author did include the yellow star to the right highlighting the fact that the difference is actually 0.5%, but why not make the graph start at 0 so the graph visusally represented the results or  if the difference is that small, don’t have a graph at all and just say there is essentially no difference for this type of benchmark.

I think the way the graph was made was very likely the result of the default settings that the charting tool used, and I don’t think the author had any intention of misleading people (especially since he highlighted the real difference outside the graph),  but if I generated a graph that I felt didn’t reflect what I was trying to convey I would fix it or leave it out.

Besides the egregious graph, I think the presentation overall was very good.  I especially liked the recommendation section at the end, which was very actionable.