Unix system administration bulletin, 2005

NEWS CONTENTS

• 20051102 : MValent to release updated apps management software - Computerworld ( MValent to release updated apps management software - Computerworld, Nov 02, 2005 )
• 20051007 : mValent ¦ Powerful Change Control ( mValent ¦ Powerful Change Control, Oct 7, 2005 )
• 20050523 : The Fifth Commandment of system administration by Brian Warshawsky ( NewsForge )

Old News ;-)

[Nov 02, 2005] MValent to release updated apps management software - Computerworld

Two companies offer products that are similar to mValent's offering: Relicore Inc. in Burlington, Mass., and Collation Inc. in Redwood City, Calif. But mValent seems to be unique because it focuses on the entire life cycle of managing applications, from predeployment into deployment, Drogseth said.

(COMPUTERWORLD) - MValent Inc. next week plans to take the wraps off the latest version of mValent Integrity, software that's designed to automate the configuration and management of application and Web servers and other application components.

The software, which will be available on Monday, starts at $60,000 and will be deployed by several existing mValent customers, including WorldWinner Inc., an online gaming company in Newton, Mass., and State Street Corp., a financial services company in Boston, according to executives at the companies.

... ... ...

State Street expects to upgrade to mValent Integrity soon, said Joseph Kennedy, State Street's vice president of IT. State Street wants to stay current with the product, since prior versions have reduced the time needed to debug new application configurations. State Street uses MValent software to monitor a variety of systems that affect its 19,000 employees, he said.

Kennedy said mValent has helped the financial services firm add scalability to its application infrastructure and resolve problems with configurations, something he called "invaluable." State Street has been able to expand the application environments it maintains without adding system administrators, he said.

MValent Integrity appears to be unique in the market, said two analysts, Jean-Pierre Garbanim at Forrester Research Inc. and Dennis Drogseth at Enterprise Management Associates.

[Oct 7, 2005] mValent ¦ Powerful Change Control

mValent Integrity tracks changes to deployed servers and monitors configuration drift alerting IT teams to potentially critical problems. By comparing application environments in mValent Integrity for differences in granular configuration items, IT teams rapidly isolate root causes of production incidents. These teams can then model fixes to problems to validate their impact and automatically deploy them.

• Rich Compare Capabilities – mValent Integrity's Compare function aids troubleshooting by quickly pinpointing differences between multiple server instances or across infrastructure stacks representing different application environments.
• Versioning and Rollback - Running 'snapshots' of application infrastructure environments, plus the ability to recover quickly from unwanted changes.
• Tracking and Alerts - Knowing when a change has been made - no matter what changed - and accurately reporting on the specific properties before and after the change, gives IT teams early warning on potential problems.
• Point-in-Time Views - By keeping a running record of changes to a granular level, mValent Integrity reports on all changes that occurred between two points in time, or show that no unapproved changes took place.
• Audit Reports – Show the changes made to an individual server or a whole production environment by time period or by user.

[May 23, 2005] The Fifth Commandment of system administration by Brian Warshawsky

NewsForge

If you're a good administrator, you pride yourself on developing a fundamental understanding of the systems you build. After a while, as you begin to comprehend the complete complexity that goes along with building and maintaining your infrastructure, the commands and procedures to control them become second nature. You have to look at the documentation less and less, until eventually people refer to you as a guru. Having this kind of understanding of your servers is important, but it does no good if you aren't available when something crashes. By creating detailed written policies detailing the ins and outs of your systems in advance, you can provide critical background information to your backup admin who can use it to restore functionality in your absence.

V. Thou shalt document complete and effective policies and procedures

In the past I found documented policies useful especially at two different times. The first is at the inception of a project. Before the system goes into production, sometimes even before the hardware is bought, detail in writing exactly what you need the server to accomplish, where its performance bottlenecks will be, and what your intentions are to correct these issues. This will allow you (and upper management!) to know that your time is not being spent chasing a fantasy implementation that will never work. It also helps you to better understand the nature of the beast you're building. If anything goes wrong during the installation and configuration process (and something always does) you'll be better prepared to deal with it simply due to the better understanding you've obtained by mapping everything out beforehand. At this point you don't need anything more than an outline (sometimes in the form of a project plan) and a few diagrams to guide you. If it's a much larger-scale implementation though, you'll need a detailed project plan dividing the entire process into phases. For instance, a large-scale Beowulf cluster would require a detailed project plan, while a new intranet Web server might only require a brief outline of configuration tasks and a diagram showing how it's integrated into network.

The second time that these policies are important is after the server has finished configuration and is ready to go into a production environment. At this point, before it is rolled out, you should take some time to create some detailed step-by-step documents explaining the backup restoration process, the steps necessary to restart a service (or just make a list of important services that might need to be restarted, depending upon the experience of your back admins) and anything else that might be helpful. Just remember that you won't always be available to fix something; having detailed instructions for common problems or routine exercises can make the difference between 10 minutes of downtime and a week and a half if you are unavailable.

The commandments so far:
I. Thou shalt make regular and complete backups
II. Thou shalt establish absolute trust in thy servers
III. Thou shalt be the first to know when something goes down
IV. Thou shalt keep server logs on everything
V. Thou shalt document complete and effective policies and procedures

Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

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Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS :  Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development :  Scripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month :  How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D

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Last modified: March 12, 2019