When explaining to beginners, use simple examples.
I've always felt that most geeks give examples (to beginners) that are too complex. I believe this is an attempt to be complete. However, beginner examples should be so simple even if you feel like you...
View ArticleOursourcing makes sense if you think "software" is a fad
[This piece gets kind of dark. You've been warned.] At the recent DOES15 conference (which was a great conference) many of success stories included the admission that outsourcing had been a big...
View ArticleAutomation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron
Q: Dear Tom: A few years ago we automated a major process in our system administration team. Now the system is impossible to debug. Nobody remembers the old manual process and the automation is beyond...
View ArticleBYOBook Signing at LISA '15
I hadn't planned on doing a book signing at LISA this year but a number of people have asked, so I've set one up. You'll have to bring your own copy as I won't have copies to sell or give away. What:...
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Christine's keynote at OpsCon Milano 2015
Christine Hogan gave the keynote presentation at OpsCon Milano 2015 today. Her talk was titled "Learn to Fail Better" and highlighted cultural and technical points from our new book, The Practice of...
View ArticleWhat JJ Abrams just revealed about Star Wars
Last night (Saturday, Nov 21) I attended a fundraiser for the Montclair Film Festival where (I kid you not) for 90 minutes we watched Stephen Colbert interview J.J. Abrams. What I learned: He finished...
View ArticleWe forget how big "big" is
Talk with any data-scientist and they'll rant about how they hate the phrase "big data". Odds are they'll mention a story like the following: My employer came to me and said we want to do some 'big...
View ArticleWhy I don't care that Dell installs Rogue Certificates On Laptops
In recent weeks Dell has been found to have installed rogue certificates on laptops they sell. Not once, but twice. The security ramifications of this are grim. Such a laptop can have its SSL-encrypted...
View ArticlePreview 8 chapters from the next edition of TPOSANA
The 3rd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration won't be out for another year. However, we've released a set of 8 chapters on SafariBooksOnline.com (SBO). We've taken the previous...
View ArticleTom speaking at BackBayLISA in January (Boston)
I'll be giving a presentation called "Transactional System Administration Is Killing Us and Must be Stopped" at the January 2016 meeting of BackBay LISA (BBLISA). This is the same talk I presented...
View ArticleCascadia IT Conference CFP Reminder
Call for Participation is open at http://casitconf.org/casitconf16/cfp/ The conference will be in Seattle, WA, on March 11-12, 2106. Submit your proposal by December 25th. If you've never given a...
View ArticleEver run a Novell network?
If you ran a Novell network, especially in the late 80s or early 90s, I hope you watched The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last night when he interviewed Steve Carell and talked about their brief work...
View Article7 signs you're doing devops wrong
Adam Bertram wrote an excellent piece in InfoWorld: 7 signs you're doing devops wrong
View ArticleNew issue of acmQueue is out!
I write a column in ACM Queue magazine called "Everything Sysadmin" (guess where I got the idea for the name?). It appears 3 times a year. The new issue is out and contains a column that answers 2...
View ArticleNYC DevOps: Bridget Kromhout and Casey West - Sometimes you feel like a...
This month's NYCDevOps meeting (hosted at the StackOverflow.com HQ) has special guest speakers Bridget Kromhout and Casey West talking about running Docker images in Cloud Foundry's Elastic Runtime and...
View ArticleHow can sysadmins devalue themselves?
The new edition of ACM Queue Magazine is out. My column (called "Everything Sysadmin") answers 1-2 questions per issue. This issue's questions are: Q: Dear Tom, How can I devalue my work? Lately I've...
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We can solve the terrorist encryption problem with this one simple solution!
*Lately there has been a renewed debate over the use of encrypted communication. Terrorists could be using encryption to hide their communication. Everyone knows this. The problem is that encryption is...
View ArticleUgh.
My credit union tells me their website will be down Saturday night for upgrades. This not only means that they don't have a good DevOps-style rapid release CI/CD system, but that they have no respect...
View ArticleBest and Worst DevOps songs of 2015
Wait... you didn't know there are songs about DevOps? Hell to the yeah! Best DevOps Song of 2015: Uptown Funk (Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars) Uptown Funk is exemplary of good DevOps operations: It...
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Peter Naur, RIP, (1928-2016)
Computer scientists Peter Naur has passed away. He is the "N" in "BNF". If you aren't sure what BNF is, you may recognize it as a diagram like this: or this: You can imagine how error prone it was to...
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