Re: [SAGE] Respondents needed for article on sysadmin survival

[Tillman Hodgson <tillman@seekingfire.com>]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 11:48:47PM -0800, Mason Schmitt wrote:
> However, for anyone on this list that has not heard of or read "The Practice 
> of System and Network Management" by Tom Limoncelli and Christine Hogan, I 
> heartily recommend it.

I can second that. It covers topics very intelligently (including
aspects I'd never thought of before) and with an approachable format.

> For any of you that have not heard infrastructures.org and the paper
> "Bootstrapping an Infrastructure" both are an excellent introduction
> to a different view of systems as "enterprise virtual machines" rather
> than discreet computers managed with, what the paper refers to as,
> "adhoc" tools.  It's a wonderful paradigm shift that I expect to give
> huge returns in my network.

The paper was first published at LISA 98, for folks that like digging
through http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/.

I've been returning to that paper for the past few years, pulling ideas
from it here and there, but I've never implemented a complete coherent
infrastructure out of it. I've been tempted for some time to use some of
my copious spare time to create a paper describing an idealized
environment modeled on the paper but tied to specific applications
running in a homogenous FreeBSD environment. The idea is that it would
be become more "concrete" for folks that haven't been already been
thinking about this topic.

I've love to hear about the specifics of your infrastructure, any
lessons learned, and some of the preliminary results.

-T


-- 
Immobility is often mistaken for peace.
	- Emperor Elrood Corrino IX