Many (if not all) companies have provisos when you become a salaried employee that you not discuss your salary/compensation package with other employees. Most people have been raised in a mindset, largely because their parents have worked for companies like this (and maybe their grandparents, too – it is 2013, after all, and this is …
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Category:work
automating or automation?
I have been working in the realm of “automation” – specifically data center automation – for several years. Merriam-Webster defines “automating” thusly: to operate by automation to convert to largely automatic operation <automate a process> Notice the subtle difference with M-W’s definition of “automation“: the technique of making an apparatus, a process, or a system operate automatically the state of being …
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free wifi
I travel a fair amount for work – not excessive “road warrior” style anymore (thank God!), but often enough. One thing that has consistently dumb founded me is that, like cheap hotels, the smaller the airport, the more likely it is that it has free wifi. I understand places like ATL or ORD are incredibly …
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delivering solutions – “shipping is a feature!”
Back in 2009, {{Joel Spolsky}} wrote an article called The Duct Tape Programmer. Of everything he has written, I think this is the very pinnacle, and it is summed in one simple sentence in the middle: “Shipping is a feature.” I’ve referenced this article twice before (in Feb and Sep of ’11). Why is this …
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don’t implement your scheduler in a pure queue design
Recently came across a seriously funky issue with one of HP’s products (don’t laugh – I know there’s loads of funkiness in HP tools). HP Cloud Service Automation (3.1) allows you to schedule requests in the future. It also allows you schedule end dates for subscriptions. That’s neat. Here’s the problem: if you delete a …
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annapolis
At the beginning of 2008 I interviewed with a little outfit* in Annapolis to become their head of support. (This was just a month after interviewing with FogCreek.) Oddly enough that day, one of my former colleagues at Opsware who had moved-on was my tech screener. Needless to say, that aspect of the interview I …
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call
I learned about the call command in Windows recently. Some context – was trying to run a command via HPSA at a customer, but kept getting an error that the program was not a recognized internal or external command. Very frustrating. Then one of the guys I worked with suggested adding a “call” to the …
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organizational knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination
Knowledge capture, retention, and dissemination has been an interest of mine for a long time. I have written about various aspects of it before. The most vital commodity any organization has is the knowledge of its members – it does not matter if it is a historical society, company, church, or school: the organizational knowledge …
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passive income is not a business plan
Shortcuts. Shortcuts are great. But only when you know the long way. Without hard work, the short cut will seem hard. Passive income seems to fall into this category. Some people think panhandling is a form of passive income. It’s not. The panhandler works for his money – he talks to people, shakes a cup, whatever: he …
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finding your niche
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” You’ve probably been asked that questions hundreds of times in your life – parents, friends, teachers, yourself, movies. It’s a common theme. For most of us, the decision gets made sometime in our late teens or during college: doctor, mom, lawyer, electrician, plumber, teacher, policeman, …
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certifications and dependencies
Last week I participated in a beta class for HP’s new Cloud Service Automation 3.0 product release (ok, so it’s a prerelease, and “product” is a strong term). 3.0 is a full rewrite from 2.x, so there is no upgrade path. Also, not everything that “appears” to be in place OOB is actually working – …
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automatically returning a host to the unprovisioned server pool in hpsa
In conjunction with the customized PXE process I wrote about previously, it could be highly desirable to be able to return a server to the unprovisioned server pool in HP’s Server Automation. This is a specifically-Linux procedure: though I’m sure something similar can be done with Windows*. run an ad-hoc script against a target server that …
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professional lying – or is it laziness?
I have noticed an unusual percentage of professional CVs/work histories/resumes on LinkedIn (specifically) that have some fairly blatant errors in them. For example, I have seen people list multiple full-time jobs that they could not have had at the same time (eg, both at one employer and also at the company that acquired their old employer). I’ve …
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binding your mounts
Over the past several years, I have grown quite fond of the ability to do bind mounts on Linux. First, a little background. Most applications have specific directory structure requirements. Many have wildly varying space requirements depending on how a given install is utilized. For example, HPSA can use anywhere from 40-400-4000 gigabytes of space …
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using social media at/for/with work
I am very curious to know how people utilize social media in relation to work: blogging tweets etc I know it’s not horribly scientific, but if you’d be willing to participate in this inquiry, please leave a comment. I’ll be putting up a more formal poll in the coming days. Thanks!
a plea for following standards
If you ever install or setup something that someone else will have to maintain, please, please, please follow as close as possible the vendor’s typical installation process. And whether you go “standard” or not, please, please, please document everything you do! Those of us who will come after you will be intensely grateful for your …
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extended file attributes with ext[2|3|4]
Most Unix/Linux users, and – hopefully – all admins are familiar with the standard 9 bits of permissions typically supported on various *nix file systems: ——— rwxrwxrwx uuugggooo Where “u”, “g”, and “o” indicate “user”, “group”, and “other” while “rwx” indicates whether the item can be read, written, or executed. Also of note are file ownerships in …
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gaming expense reports? really?
At various stages in my career, I have traveled extensively – yet never even thought of “gaming” the expense reproting system the way it has been recently reported by CNN. Being terminated over charging a movie to your room? Seems harsh (getting the $9.95 back from the employee would seem to be easier) – but breaking the rule …
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defaulting pxe boots with hpsa
I recently found a very helpful nugget with regards to OS Provisioning with HP’s Server Automation product. OS Prov is most typically done using PXE (or the similar bootp process). SA provides a PXE server that gives a boot menu to network-booted systems. That menu contains a variety of choices: linux, windows, winpe, etc. In …
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doing technical phone screens
Related to a previous post on career development, I thought it could be interesting to look at one approach to the technical screen that I have used over the past few years when interviewing candidates. for folks with no “real” experience yet, I ask them to rank themselves on a few key technologies on the …
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http is a stateless protocol
The ubiquitous protocol that enables the internet as we know it, http, is stateless. Stateless merely means that any given request has nothing to do with the previous, or the next request. This enables the world wide web, as web servers do not need to keep track of who is receiving data, nor ow much …
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technical career development
Career development. Career path. Development opportunities. Taking your career to the next level. Terms and phrases we all hear and pretty much pass over in our day-to-day lives. Right up until we want to move to a new/better job or performance reviews roll around. But what do they mean, and how can you advance your …
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ogsh/ogfs for fun and profit
The absolute coolest feature of HP’s Server Automation suite is the OGSH (or OGFS) – the Opsware Global SHell (or FileSystem). I worked for Opsware before HP acquired them, and the OGSH was a new feature to the product (then called Opsware SAS (Server Automation System)). It’s a fuse module that gives a [limited] bash interface …
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the ticket smash, raw metrics, and communication – how to have a successful support organization
When I worked at Opsware, and for a while after HP bought us, we used to try to have once- or twice-a-week meetings for each support group wherein we would bring our most difficult cases (with the difficulty being determined by the case owner), and have an opportunity for everyone on the team to ask questions, …
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bglug meeting – 17 september – topic: data center automation
The September meeting of the Bluegrass Linux User Group will be this Saturday, 17 Sep. We’ll be meeting at Collexion’s facilities in Lexington at 2:30p. I will be presenting on data center automation, specifically on HP’s Server Automation platform (the tool I use on my day job). Some [limited] history of HPSA is available on the Opsware …
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