(De)Centralized

“The primary motivation for the decentralized model is to give the individual departments better or more customized service through having a stronger relationship with the SAs and more control over the work that they do. The primary motivation for centralizing system administration is to control costs through tracking costs centrally and then reducing them by eliminating redundancy and taking advantage of economies of scale”

– The Practice of System and Network Administration, Thomas A. Limoncelli and Christine Hogan.

Bingo. But can there be a third hybrid model?

I currently represent the decentralized model and I must agree with these two fine authors that the benefit of my close working relationship with the individual department/group is that the service provided is highly customized and focused. The central IT department(s) are understandably focused on large-scale issues (“Infrastructure”, “Communications”, “Collaboration”, “Applications”) and as such do not always represent the most ideal channel for delivery of IT services to the various research groups and departments on campus, often with more nuanced, specialized and micro-level issues.

One of my developing long-term goals is to (warning: business jargon) “bridge the gap” between the focused local support that I currently represent and the value proposition(s) of centralized IT services. I’m not yet entirely certain of how to accomplish this but I am certain that there is a way to improve the delivery of IT services to researchers across all our campuses and I want to be involved.

Does such an approach warrant the definition of a third hybrid model or is this so-called bridging of the gap already encapsulated in the model of centralized vs. decentralized?

Some of the challenges I face specifically as a “standalone” decentralized sysadmin on campus are:

• Dealing with all IT needs from desktop support to infrastructure development to data security
• Developing and maintaining vendor contacts and relationships
• No immediate peers in our environment to bounce specific ideas around with
• Weak purchasing power and negotiation leverage
• Duplication of effort
• Career progression is potentially limited
• All too easy to develop a “King of the Castle” attitude
• Complacency

Some of the concerns I hear about when introducing researchers to the idea of centralized IT support:

• General lack of trust/faith in the centralized IT department
• Perceived lack of personal attention and focus (turn around times, site knowledge, etc.)
• Perceived lack of “control” over their environment (and data!) under the centralized model
• Charge-back models for IT services are viewed as grant-unfriendly
• Physical hardware ownership appears to remain important for many researchers

Of course, this is but a snapshot of the challenges I face and the concerns I’ve been hearing but they do serve as decent examples. It must also be noted that I am seeing great progress is many of these areas already because there are very bright people here already working on these challenges. My interest in this field is absolutely not unique.

For the immediate future, I’m focusing on improving my collaborations and communication with centralized IT services by helping them out where I can and leaning on them more often for our localized problems. My hope is that by constantly forging a closer working relationship will increasingly expose me (and in turn, our group) to the benefits of the centralized IT model while providing the central IT group with greater insight into our environment and how we work.

The next steps are still a mystery to me but I’m keeping my eyes open for new opportunities to bring better IT to research.

Career Development

Career development is a funny thing for me to be writing about. A few years ago, it wasn’t something I really thought about too much. It’s not that I wasn’t aware or cognizant of the benefits of thinking about it and spending time considering my future, it’s that I was younger and a lot more focused on the “now”. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t get old overnight and I still value the philosophical concepts of my youth but I now see additional value in also paying attention to the future.

Today, I’m on the brink of making another significant career move and career development is front and centre in my day to day thoughts. Hence, rant.

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Oracle Cold Call

I just received a cold call from Oracle moments ago. I’m actually a bit shocked to be honest.

Let’s describe my relationship with Oracle for a moment:

• In seven years as a sysadmin, I’ve never had a business relationship with Oracle
• I’ve never run an Oracle product in any of my shops
• I’ve never directly or indirectly inquired about Oracle products with Oracle or their resellers
• I’ve never once feigned interest in anything Oracle has done until the day they bought Sun Microsystems

So what was the cold call about? They wanted to sell me on Oracle Unbreakable Linux and Oracle VM. They were targeting our RedHat (well, CentOS) installations and wanted to get a foot in the door for their virtualization product (Xen) Thanks, but seriously… No thanks!

I’ve been approached by vendors before at trade shows or expos or even via existing reseller relationships but this out of the blue cold call is entirely new to me. I can ignore the fact that Oracle’s representative had less than stellar English skills. That’s not paramount, although it made for lengthy repetitions where it otherwise wouldn’t have been necessary. It’s that cold call tactic that has me fired up! Are they seriously trolling my employer’s public directory in which my name and number is listed to see if anything bites?

Overall, I’m really turned off by Oracle’s slimy cold call tactics. Please don’t call again, Oracle. Your rebranded-and-slightly-modified RHEL and Xen clones be damned!

Is Ubuntu Ready for the Enterprise?

Yep, the title is click bait intended to grab attention… well as much of click bait as anything on techslaves.org can be (which is decidedly not very much) but I’ve just been pretty frustrated with Ubuntu as a client OS recently.

There are two really annoying and critical bugs that have been sitting around, unresolved for too long. One revolves around the NFS client. Apparently there was a regression in the mainline kernel at version 2.6.27 that causes NFS lockup/freeze. Both 10.04 and 10.10 have been affected but Ubuntu has yet to release the fix although it’s been available since august in the mainline kernel. The second bug revolves around Network Manager and autofs maps in LDAP. Basically, you have to get Network Manager to “autofs reload” every time it brings up or down the network interface. No big deal as this can be scripted, but I would really expect an official fix for this.

Ok, so it’s not Ubuntu’s fault there was a mainline kernel regression regarding NFS client code and it’s not Ubuntu’s fault that Network Manager behaves the way it does. However, I do expect a Linux vendor that considers themselves ready for the Enterprise to be able to backport critical kernel fixes so that their users don’t have to sit around waiting with their thumbs up their asses until the fix makes it’s way into an official kernel release and then into an Ubuntu kernel update. As for the autofs maps in LDAP/Network Manager issue, I would not only expect an enterprise ready distribution to have tested this functionality before release but also that once it’s reported that a real, official fix released quickly that everyone can use instead of having to follow bug report comment suggestions to get things working.

I realize Ubuntu is mainly a desktop OS. That’s ok. But all this “Ubuntu is ready for the Enterprise!!! GO CANONICAL!!!!” stuff simply can’t be justified when two official releases in a row come up with show-stopping bugs and there still isn’t a fix nor an official recommended workaround.

</rant>

iPad & Tablet Thoughts From Your Friendly Neighbourhood Irrelevant Internet Guy

Let me preface this by saying that I do not own an iPad nor do I own any other “tablet” like device. I’ve played with an iPad and some of the older generation of Windows tablets (Laptops with swivel screens and stylus input running a “Tablet Edition” of Window) but I have no exceptional experience with anything I’m going to rant about. That said, I’m still going to talk about them.

I’m going to try to address various talking points I’ve been reading in articles, comments and blogs but don’t sue me if I miss anything.

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