From atilekt at gmail.com Thu Jan 15 23:33:40 2015 From: atilekt at gmail.com (Victor Gichun) Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 23:33:40 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) Message-ID: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> Hi everyone, this is Victor Gichun with CleanBayArea. I?ve just come home from the latest Baylisa?s meetup. Thank you Baylisa and Sunay Tripathy for a very interesting presentation, bear and pizza. I'd like to announce a contest which CleanBayArea has just ran: "Save the environment and win iPhone 6? Whoever can get rid of the most used computers, servers, laptops, networking and electronic equipment win the prize Brand New Black iPhone 6 128Gb. To take part in the contest please connect with me by email contact at cleanbayarea.com or phone 408-402-1073 Let's Keep Bay Area Clean! Sincerely yours, Victor Gichun From rsr at inorganic.org Fri Jan 16 08:26:39 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 08:26:39 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) In-Reply-To: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> References: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> Message-ID: <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> On 1/15/15 11:33 PM, Victor Gichun wrote: > Hi everyone, this is Victor Gichun with CleanBayArea. Shocked I am not. For those who haven't looked at the archives lately, allow me to summarize activity on this mailing list over the last four months: December: 3 emails, all from Victor Gichun, promoting his business November: 1 email, from Victor Gichun October: 1 email, from Victor Gichun September: 1 email, from Robert Novak. Non-commercial. Yay. In true open-source fashion, I can of course unsubscribe and avoid the annoyance. The question, however, is: Is this what we want this mailing list to be? Should we just make Victor Gichun the admin for this mailing list and admit it's a distribution list for CleanBayArea spam? -roy From rnovak at gmail.com Fri Jan 16 08:59:48 2015 From: rnovak at gmail.com (Robert Novak) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 08:59:48 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) In-Reply-To: <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> References: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> Message-ID: You forgot... January: 1 email from Roy complaining about the wrong kind of content on the list. Ironic. While I was on the board, I told Victor that it was okay to post once a month. Clean Bay Area has provided much-appreciated financial support to BayLISA in the past few months and is likely to do so in the future. As I'm no longer on the board, I'm not in a position to revoke that authorization, and given the other activity on the list I don't feel any reason to advocate the same. I would recommend civilly reaching out to the board if you want to change this recommendation. Another option would be to help generate the sort of traffic you'd like to see on the list. Post questions, conversation starters, polls, ideas for future meetings and events, etc. I can whole-heartedly advocate this, for you and for anyone else on the list. This might not be as rewarding as complaining loudly and unproductively to several hundred people, but it might be productive, and actually stand some risk of getting to where you seem to want things to go. Robert On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:26 AM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > On 1/15/15 11:33 PM, Victor Gichun wrote: > >> Hi everyone, this is Victor Gichun with CleanBayArea. >> > > Shocked I am not. For those who haven't looked at the archives lately, > allow me to summarize activity on this mailing list over the last four > months: > > December: 3 emails, all from Victor Gichun, promoting his business > November: 1 email, from Victor Gichun > October: 1 email, from Victor Gichun > September: 1 email, from Robert Novak. Non-commercial. Yay. > > In true open-source fashion, I can of course unsubscribe and avoid the > annoyance. The question, however, is: Is this what we want this mailing > list to be? Should we just make Victor Gichun the admin for this mailing > list and admit it's a distribution list for CleanBayArea spam? > > -roy > > > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From atilekt at gmail.com Fri Jan 16 09:11:04 2015 From: atilekt at gmail.com (Victor Gichun) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 09:11:04 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) In-Reply-To: <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> References: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> Message-ID: Dear Roy, I'm sorry to hear that my emails disappointed you. I've got a permission of Robert Novak to send 1 email a month to remind members about our FREE service. This is not SPAM. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm trying to pay your and other Baylisa's members attention to recycle used equipment instead of disposing it into dumpster. According statistics 70% system administrators dispose used equipment into dumpsters instead of properly recycling them. Besides saving the environment we financially support Baylisa and we'll appreciate if you Rob and other Baylisa's members participate in our initiative and help us to protect the environment in SF Bay Area. Sincerely yours, Victor Gichun On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:26 AM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > On 1/15/15 11:33 PM, Victor Gichun wrote: > >> Hi everyone, this is Victor Gichun with CleanBayArea. >> > > Shocked I am not. For those who haven't looked at the archives lately, > allow me to summarize activity on this mailing list over the last four > months: > > December: 3 emails, all from Victor Gichun, promoting his business > November: 1 email, from Victor Gichun > October: 1 email, from Victor Gichun > September: 1 email, from Robert Novak. Non-commercial. Yay. > > In true open-source fashion, I can of course unsubscribe and avoid the > annoyance. The question, however, is: Is this what we want this mailing > list to be? Should we just make Victor Gichun the admin for this mailing > list and admit it's a distribution list for CleanBayArea spam? > > -roy > > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > -- -- Best Regards, Victor Gichun Recycling manager CleanBayArea.com 408-402-1073 From rsr at inorganic.org Fri Jan 16 09:11:59 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 09:11:59 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) In-Reply-To: References: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <54B9465F.5020003@inorganic.org> Oh yes, let's do this. On 1/16/15 8:59 AM, Robert Novak wrote: > January: 1 email from Roy complaining about the wrong kind of content on > the list. Ironic. I'm OK with discussions about where we want this list to go, and what content should go on it. I'm also OK with other people, e.g. you, participating in these discussions. Frankly, I'd take almost any reasonably-civilized conversation amongst people who think of themselves as having an interest in BayLISA over repeated commercial content. > While I was on the board, I told Victor that it was okay to post once a > month. Ah, OK. See, this is why it's good that we talk about this, because I didn't realize that part of the perks of financially supporting BayLISA was sending commercial messages to the list. Putting aside the fact he sent three messages in December (naughty), I'm perfectly fine, knowing this context (and assuming CBA is continuing to financially support BayLISA), just ignoring their emails from now on. > This might not be as rewarding as complaining loudly and unproductively > to several hundred people, but it might be productive, and actually > stand some risk of getting to where you seem to want things to go. This is a surprisingly harsh and unproductive response to my email, Robert. I noted CBA's emails and I asked questions as to whether or not this was what we wanted from the list. I started a conversation, which -- by the way -- is exactly what you're suggesting in your email that I do. (Of course, if this ends up being a snipe exchange containing just you and I, I suspect we should just take it to personal email; but I'm hopeful other people will weigh in as well) -roy From atilekt at gmail.com Fri Jan 16 09:28:24 2015 From: atilekt at gmail.com (Victor Gichun) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 09:28:24 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) In-Reply-To: <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> References: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <390204D7-E0DF-49ED-9E94-79AF78C06A1F@gmail.com> Dear Roy, I'm sorry to hear that my emails disappointed you. I've got a permission of Robert Novak to send 1 email a month to remind members about our FREE service. This is not SPAM. I'm not trying to sell anything. I'm trying to pay your and other Baylisa's members attention to recycle used equipment instead of disposing it into dumpster. According statistics 70% system administrators dispose used equipment into dumpsters instead of properly recycling them. Besides saving the environment we financially support Baylisa and we'll appreciate if you Rob and other Baylisa's members participate in our initiative and help us to protect the environment in SF Bay Area. Sincerely yours, Victor Gichun On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 8:26 AM, Roy Rapoport > wrote: On 1/15/15 11:33 PM, Victor Gichun wrote: Hi everyone, this is Victor Gichun with CleanBayArea. Shocked I am not. For those who haven't looked at the archives lately, allow me to summarize activity on this mailing list over the last four months: December: 3 emails, all from Victor Gichun, promoting his business November: 1 email, from Victor Gichun October: 1 email, from Victor Gichun September: 1 email, from Robert Novak. Non-commercial. Yay. In true open-source fashion, I can of course unsubscribe and avoid the annoyance. The question, however, is: Is this what we want this mailing list to be? Should we just make Victor Gichun the admin for this mailing list and admit it's a distribution list for CleanBayArea spam? -roy _______________________________________________ Baylisa mailing list Baylisa at baylisa.org http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa -- -- Best Regards, Victor Gichun Recycling manager CleanBayArea.com 408-402-1073 From matt.cary at nasa.gov Fri Jan 16 09:38:47 2015 From: matt.cary at nasa.gov (Matt F. Cary) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 09:38:47 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Save the environment and win iPhone 6 (contest from CleanBayArea) In-Reply-To: <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> References: <4C7B29FF-0D88-4956-A34C-DA30F75DC3A2@gmail.com> <54B93BBF.7040107@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <20150116173847.GA4568@linux163.nas.nasa.gov> At 2015/01/16/08:26 -0800 Roy Rapoport wrote: > On 1/15/15 11:33 PM, Victor Gichun wrote: > >Hi everyone, this is Victor Gichun with CleanBayArea. > > Shocked I am not. For those who haven't looked at the archives > lately, allow me to summarize activity on this mailing list over the > last four months: > > December: 3 emails, all from Victor Gichun, promoting his business > November: 1 email, from Victor Gichun > October: 1 email, from Victor Gichun > September: 1 email, from Robert Novak. Non-commercial. Yay. > > In true open-source fashion, I can of course unsubscribe and avoid > the annoyance. The question, however, is: Is this what we want this > mailing list to be? Should we just make Victor Gichun the admin for > this mailing list and admit it's a distribution list for > CleanBayArea spam? I hadn't noticed the pattern, but I certainly agree that emails like the last one are clearly inappropriate. It's often good for a mailing list to be low volume, but this one is too low, IMO. I'd like to at least see the announcement of the monthly meeting here, since I seldom go to the BayLisa Meetup page. I use GreenCitizen for recycling anyways, with whom I have no affiliation. :-) -- "It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead." -- Thomas Jefferson From rsr at inorganic.org Fri Jan 16 17:24:52 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 17:24:52 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators Message-ID: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> So in the interest in having more interesting conversations on this list ... BayLISA is the Bay Area Large Installation System Administrators group. Traditionally, its memberships has been System Administrators, defined as both a self-identification and a job title. It appears to me that more and more advanced companies out there are moving away from the System Administrator job title and, in some cases, the System Administrator role (Netflix, for example, has no System Administrators in the production path for streaming). What happens to sysadmins? -roy From bferrell at baywinds.org Fri Jan 16 18:01:45 2015 From: bferrell at baywinds.org (Bruce Ferrell) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:01:45 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <54B9C289.8010409@baywinds.org> Roy, I think they turned into devops... But I'm not sure On 01/16/2015 05:24 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > So in the interest in having more interesting conversations on this list ... > > BayLISA is the Bay Area Large Installation System Administrators group. Traditionally, its memberships has been System Administrators, defined as both a self-identification and > a job title. > > It appears to me that more and more advanced companies out there are moving away from the System Administrator job title and, in some cases, the System Administrator role > (Netflix, for example, has no System Administrators in the production path for streaming). > > What happens to sysadmins? > > -roy > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From boardnutz at blacklight.net Fri Jan 16 18:14:21 2015 From: boardnutz at blacklight.net (Sean Hart) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:14:21 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> On 1/16/15 5:24 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > So in the interest in having more interesting conversations on this > list ... > > BayLISA is the Bay Area Large Installation System Administrators > group. Traditionally, its memberships has been System Administrators, > defined as both a self-identification and a job title. > > It appears to me that more and more advanced companies out there are > moving away from the System Administrator job title and, in some > cases, the System Administrator role (Netflix, for example, has no > System Administrators in the production path for streaming). > > What happens to sysadmins? > > -roy > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa Good topic! So, first off. A lot of the low level sysadmins (kernel hackers, rack-and-stackers, killer network folks, etc.) will go to huge installations like Rackspace and Joyent and AWS. They will do awesome things there. The Systems folks who do software installation and configuration/tuning will pick up chef/puppet/ansible/$CONFIG_MGMT_OF_THE_WEEK, and everything will be represented as code changes. The all around, jack of all trades folks... There's a lot here, but will be mostly writing automation code of one form or another (Provisioning, install, config, deployment, continuous integration/deployment, etc.). They will be working on the Infrastructure as code movement and moving further and further up the stack. The term DevOps has been given to this role, but DevOps isn't supposed to be a role, it's supposed to be a culture. ~Sean From rob.markovic at gmail.com Fri Jan 16 18:54:41 2015 From: rob.markovic at gmail.com (Rob Markovic) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 18:54:41 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? Message-ID: Hi All, With the brisk wakeup of the list ;-), I have a question for you. Do you still choose to run your own remote systems for personal sites etc, vs going the cloud route, be it IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or somewhere in between. Discuss! -- Rob about.me/vRobM [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] From rsr at inorganic.org Fri Jan 16 21:38:23 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 21:38:23 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <54B9F54F.7090504@inorganic.org> On 1/16/15 6:54 PM, Rob Markovic wrote: > Do you still choose to run your own remote systems for personal sites etc, > vs going the cloud route, be it IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or somewhere in between. I'll be delighted if I never again ever need to be responsible for a physical server. I run my personal system on Linode, and I'm getting my money's worth. -roy From bferrell at baywinds.org Fri Jan 16 22:30:43 2015 From: bferrell at baywinds.org (Bruce Ferrell) Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:30:43 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <54BA0193.2030309@baywinds.org> I run my own, although I also have a cloud system for experiments as well On 01/16/2015 06:54 PM, Rob Markovic wrote: > Hi All, > > With the brisk wakeup of the list ;-), I have a question for you. > > Do you still choose to run your own remote systems for personal sites etc, > vs going the cloud route, be it IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or somewhere in between. > > Discuss! > > -- Rob > > about.me/vRobM > [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] > > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From rob.markovic at gmail.com Sat Jan 17 00:17:10 2015 From: rob.markovic at gmail.com (Rob Markovic) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:17:10 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? In-Reply-To: <54B9F54F.7090504@inorganic.org> References: <54B9F54F.7090504@inorganic.org> Message-ID: Well, it doesn't have to be a physical server.. virtual one still has similar issues management wise. It seems you prefer root and manage it yourself. -- Rob about.me/vRobM [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 9:38 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > On 1/16/15 6:54 PM, Rob Markovic wrote: > >> Do you still choose to run your own remote systems for personal sites etc, >> vs going the cloud route, be it IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or somewhere in between. >> > > I'll be delighted if I never again ever need to be responsible for a > physical server. > > I run my personal system on Linode, and I'm getting my money's worth. > > -roy > > From rob.markovic at gmail.com Sat Jan 17 00:26:17 2015 From: rob.markovic at gmail.com (Rob Markovic) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 00:26:17 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? In-Reply-To: <54BA0193.2030309@baywinds.org> References: <54BA0193.2030309@baywinds.org> Message-ID: Cool, that does seem like a good combo. -- Rob about.me/vRobM [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 10:30 PM, Bruce Ferrell wrote: > I run my own, although I also have a cloud system for experiments as well > > On 01/16/2015 06:54 PM, Rob Markovic wrote: > > Hi All, > > > > With the brisk wakeup of the list ;-), I have a question for you. > > > > Do you still choose to run your own remote systems for personal sites > etc, > > vs going the cloud route, be it IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or somewhere in between. > > > > Discuss! > > > > -- Rob > > > > about.me/vRobM > > [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Baylisa mailing list > > Baylisa at baylisa.org > > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > > > > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From rsr at inorganic.org Sat Jan 17 09:28:39 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 09:28:39 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? In-Reply-To: References: <54B9F54F.7090504@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <54BA9BC7.70905@inorganic.org> On 1/17/15 12:17 AM, Rob Markovic wrote: > Well, it doesn't have to be a physical server.. virtual one still has > similar issues management wise. > > It seems you prefer root and manage it yourself. this is where we get into discussions of what 'cloud' means :) There's a host of issues I don't need to worry about when I'm running on a virtual machine other people are responsible for. Chief among them are power, cooling, and hardware failure. But I wanted to be able to run my own software (this was originally built so I could monitor my parents' DSL line, and is still largely only used for that). -roy From jong at jong.org Sat Jan 17 10:36:54 2015 From: jong at jong.org (Jonathan Gilbert) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 10:36:54 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 6:14 PM, Sean Hart wrote: > On 1/16/15 5:24 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote: >> It appears to me that more and more advanced companies out there are >> moving away from the System Administrator job title and, in some cases, the >> System Administrator role (Netflix, for example, has no System >> Administrators in the production path for streaming). >> >> What happens to sysadmins? I had a similar conversation with a DBA recently, someone who'd spent his entire career tuning, admining, monitoring, and migrating oracle instances; he started looking at some of the cloud-based database services and realized it wasn't something he was prepared for, that there was an entire team of people abstractly re-tuning and managing the data service without engineer interaction or guidance (and doing it correctly, and without downtime). The conversation moved from a "this was neat" perspective to a realization of, "man, I'm obsolete soon, now what?" I don't see many (any?) public offerings that can successfully supplant a full time SA or DevOps team, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time. I know I'm trying to stay marginally fresh with new and existing language skills, but what are others doing to stay viable? -- - Jon Gilbert jong at jong.org / jgilbertsjc at gmail.com From rob.markovic at gmail.com Sat Jan 17 11:34:29 2015 From: rob.markovic at gmail.com (Rob Markovic) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 11:34:29 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Do you Cloud or Run your own? In-Reply-To: <54BA9BC7.70905@inorganic.org> References: <54B9F54F.7090504@inorganic.org> <54BA9BC7.70905@inorganic.org> Message-ID: Agreed. It's nice to only have to worry about your own VM, while having a trusted party handle the external environment. I need to find such a thing again, as mine have deprecated over the years. -- Rob about.me/vRobM [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 9:28 AM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > On 1/17/15 12:17 AM, Rob Markovic wrote: > >> Well, it doesn't have to be a physical server.. virtual one still has >> similar issues management wise. >> >> It seems you prefer root and manage it yourself. >> > > this is where we get into discussions of what 'cloud' means :) > > There's a host of issues I don't need to worry about when I'm running on a > virtual machine other people are responsible for. Chief among them are > power, cooling, and hardware failure. > > But I wanted to be able to run my own software (this was originally built > so I could monitor my parents' DSL line, and is still largely only used for > that). > > -roy > > From rsr at inorganic.org Sat Jan 17 23:52:33 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 23:52:33 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <54BB6641.8020208@inorganic.org> On 1/16/15 6:19 PM, Marco Nicosia wrote: > Great topic for discussion - I have been very aware of the "dual > nature" of LISA for some time. The 2013 LISA conference focus of > "DevOps" helped to further blur the lines. And that's without, even, getting into the definition of what "DevOps" means -- I finally have a decent definition of the term for me, that so far has passed muster with other people (as allergic as I am to fads), but it's a significantly overloaded term. > I don't think the world has moved away from Systems Administration. System administration in many respects continues to exist almost by virtue of the fact that we have systems to, you know, administer. However, the system administration role/profession, I think, is under some interesting pressure to evolve or (as in our company) die an ugly death. > The way I see it, just as "Data Scientist" is a new profession created > by the industry, "DevOps" is a new role, which only became a viable > career during the first Internet boom, somewhere between 1995 and > 1998? To me, the term "DevOps" is really a lagging indicator that the > industry is finally recognizing that there is a role for software > developers who are not product development focused. Yes, indeed, but I'd argue that the vast majority of sysadmins I've seen out there aren't "software developers who aren't feature-focused," but rather ... system operators who graduated to being able to maintain and build systems. > I think you folks > over at Netflix may have helped codify that by saying, "Put software > engineers in key roles in every business function." (Paraphrased.) I > believe that DevOps people are rarely focused on adding additional > product functionality, though much of what they do enables it. I'm not sure it's useful to discuss Netflix and DevOps in the same breath -- the argument has been made before that what we do could maybe more accurately be described as "NoOps," but if DevOps is the idea that your ops team and your dev team work better together (and, I'd argue, also that your ops team is productively, and efficiently, lazy), then Netflix does it different by having just the product owner team which is responsible for everything from product features to testing to deployment to setting up alerts to responding to them at 2am. That's a different model than many other companies (e.g. Google where you have SREs to do the first-level response). > But Systems Administration is alive and well. If anything, it's more > exciting and challenging than ever before. Doing a quick web search on > a random site... say ROERT HALF, shows hundreds of currently open > Systems Administration jobs. I bet if I were to drill down, I'd find > that most of them are not production roles at companies that offer > Internet services. They're IT functions at all corporations of any > given size. Everyone needs e-mail, everyone needs phones, everyone > needs laptops, etc. Well ... sure. But I feel like what you just basically said is that the last remaining roles for IT are in corporate IT (which, don't get me wrong, is invaluable and I love love love my corporate IT people) or in lagging companies. To be clear, I think there'll be sysadmin jobs for a long time to come; but I'm not convinced they'll be at companies that are considered to be cutting-edge and exciting. And that's not necessary, I suppose, if you just want to keep some sort of job until you retire, but -- like COBOL developers, or FORTRAN developers, or people who manage AIX systems -- the part of the world in which you can find a job will continue to shrink and slow down. > At the BayLISA (and LISA) meetings I've been to, I've certainly felt > an elephant in the room - IT administrators are there trying to solve > IT problems, DevOPs people are addressing DevOps problems. The > opportunity for cross pollination is significant, but I don't know > that many presentations really start with, "This is the role and the > problem that this technology is designed to address." It's not clear to me that BayLISA, and its membership, has changed significantly in the last 20 years or so since I started (very inconsistently) attending meetings; it almost feels like the general membership is still excited about exactly the same technologies that have been here for about that long, and I've seen some explicit scoffing at the idea of DevOps. There's a sense of "you kids get off my lawn" sometimes. > Is it time for a new SIG? I doubt it. Is it time for more formal > "tracks" such as what LISA did in 2013? Possibly? Are "traditional IT" > administrators getting lost in the hype around the emerging profession > of DevOps? Almost certainly. It's not just about getting lost in the hype, though. I think it's about a skills and attitude gap that ends up significantly impacting both your likelihood of being given certain kinds of jobs AND (correlating with this) significantly impacting your earning potential. With SREs getting paid somewhere between $150K and $350K (depending on where you work, of course), I don't see sysadmins -- or people with a relatively tight focus on traditional sysadmin talents -- getting paid anywhere in the same ranges. Am I wrong? -roy From rsr at inorganic.org Sat Jan 17 23:59:37 2015 From: rsr at inorganic.org (Roy Rapoport) Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 23:59:37 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> Message-ID: <54BB67E9.9040000@inorganic.org> On 1/16/15 6:14 PM, Sean Hart wrote: > So, first off. A lot of the low level sysadmins (kernel hackers, > rack-and-stackers, killer network folks, etc.) will go to huge > installations like Rackspace and Joyent and AWS. They will do awesome > things there. Putting aside the description of rack-and-stackers as doing "awesome things," I don't think it's actually accurate to say "a lot of the low level" folks will end up going to Joyent, Rackspace, etc, because with the increasing concentration of physical hardware in the hands of relatively few players, the number of jobs dealing with hardware doesn't increase -- it decreases for exactly the same sizing efficiencies that we as customers then end up taking advantage of. > The Systems folks who do software installation and configuration/tuning > will pick up chef/puppet/ansible/$CONFIG_MGMT_OF_THE_WEEK, and > everything will be represented as code changes. Some, certainly. I brought Puppet into Netflix (and some other people later brought Chef in); but it still wasn't enough to save IT from being considered obsolete to production management, partially because we had so many IT people mired in an old and systems-specific way of thinking about what we built, and what the definition of "success" was. And that old way is basically bankrupt -- IT has traditionally done a terrible job serving its customers, I'd argue (though a fair case could be made that IT's typically put in an almost impossible position where it's very unlikely to do anything but a terrible job -- one of the reasons I'd likely retire from the workforce rather than ever go into IT again). > The all around, jack of all trades folks... There's a lot here, but > will be mostly writing automation code of one form or another > (Provisioning, install, config, deployment, continuous > integration/deployment, etc.). They will be working on the > Infrastructure as code movement and moving further and further up the > stack. We've been hearing about "moving up the stack" in various contexts; remember when we heard about this in the context of the offshoring movement and what we as engineers needed to do to stay relevant and employable? We were all going to become architects, and product managers, and ... a whole bunch of other positions of which there weren't enough for everyone :) -roy From rob.markovic at gmail.com Sun Jan 18 17:41:45 2015 From: rob.markovic at gmail.com (Rob Markovic) Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 17:41:45 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: <54BB67E9.9040000@inorganic.org> References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> <54BB67E9.9040000@inorganic.org> Message-ID: With the coming wave of IoT, unfortunately, Sys Admin or not, we will all become AoT, Adminitrators of Things. Some of us already are, with who knows how many different devices at home. Not going away until things administer themselves. -- Rob about.me/vRobM [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Roy Rapoport wrote: > On 1/16/15 6:14 PM, Sean Hart wrote: > >> So, first off. A lot of the low level sysadmins (kernel hackers, >> rack-and-stackers, killer network folks, etc.) will go to huge >> installations like Rackspace and Joyent and AWS. They will do awesome >> things there. >> > > Putting aside the description of rack-and-stackers as doing "awesome > things," I don't think it's actually accurate to say "a lot of the low > level" folks will end up going to Joyent, Rackspace, etc, because with the > increasing concentration of physical hardware in the hands of relatively > few players, the number of jobs dealing with hardware doesn't increase -- > it decreases for exactly the same sizing efficiencies that we as customers > then end up taking advantage of. > > The Systems folks who do software installation and configuration/tuning >> will pick up chef/puppet/ansible/$CONFIG_MGMT_OF_THE_WEEK, and >> everything will be represented as code changes. >> > > Some, certainly. I brought Puppet into Netflix (and some other people > later brought Chef in); but it still wasn't enough to save IT from being > considered obsolete to production management, partially because we had so > many IT people mired in an old and systems-specific way of thinking about > what we built, and what the definition of "success" was. And that old way > is basically bankrupt -- IT has traditionally done a terrible job serving > its customers, I'd argue (though a fair case could be made that IT's > typically put in an almost impossible position where it's very unlikely to > do anything but a terrible job -- one of the reasons I'd likely retire from > the workforce rather than ever go into IT again). > > The all around, jack of all trades folks... There's a lot here, but >> will be mostly writing automation code of one form or another >> (Provisioning, install, config, deployment, continuous >> integration/deployment, etc.). They will be working on the >> Infrastructure as code movement and moving further and further up the >> stack. >> > > We've been hearing about "moving up the stack" in various contexts; > remember when we heard about this in the context of the offshoring movement > and what we as engineers needed to do to stay relevant and employable? We > were all going to become architects, and product managers, and ... a whole > bunch of other positions of which there weren't enough for everyone :) > > > -roy > > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From adrian.cockcroft at gmail.com Tue Jan 20 12:42:40 2015 From: adrian.cockcroft at gmail.com (Adrian Cockcroft) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 12:42:40 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> <54BB67E9.9040000@inorganic.org> Message-ID: I administrated a Raspberry Pi into submission a few weeks ago, spent an hour or so. It's going to copy the current weather from my weather station to weather underground until it gets a hardware failure and need to be replaced, hopefully it will last a few years. Is that what you meant? Adrian On Sunday, January 18, 2015, Rob Markovic wrote: > With the coming wave of IoT, unfortunately, Sys Admin or not, we will all > become AoT, Adminitrators of Things. > > Some of us already are, with who knows how many different devices at home. > > Not going away until things administer themselves. > > -- Rob > > about.me/vRobM > [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] > > > > On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Roy Rapoport > wrote: > > > On 1/16/15 6:14 PM, Sean Hart wrote: > > > >> So, first off. A lot of the low level sysadmins (kernel hackers, > >> rack-and-stackers, killer network folks, etc.) will go to huge > >> installations like Rackspace and Joyent and AWS. They will do awesome > >> things there. > >> > > > > Putting aside the description of rack-and-stackers as doing "awesome > > things," I don't think it's actually accurate to say "a lot of the low > > level" folks will end up going to Joyent, Rackspace, etc, because with > the > > increasing concentration of physical hardware in the hands of relatively > > few players, the number of jobs dealing with hardware doesn't increase -- > > it decreases for exactly the same sizing efficiencies that we as > customers > > then end up taking advantage of. > > > > The Systems folks who do software installation and configuration/tuning > >> will pick up chef/puppet/ansible/$CONFIG_MGMT_OF_THE_WEEK, and > >> everything will be represented as code changes. > >> > > > > Some, certainly. I brought Puppet into Netflix (and some other people > > later brought Chef in); but it still wasn't enough to save IT from being > > considered obsolete to production management, partially because we had so > > many IT people mired in an old and systems-specific way of thinking about > > what we built, and what the definition of "success" was. And that old > way > > is basically bankrupt -- IT has traditionally done a terrible job serving > > its customers, I'd argue (though a fair case could be made that IT's > > typically put in an almost impossible position where it's very unlikely > to > > do anything but a terrible job -- one of the reasons I'd likely retire > from > > the workforce rather than ever go into IT again). > > > > The all around, jack of all trades folks... There's a lot here, but > >> will be mostly writing automation code of one form or another > >> (Provisioning, install, config, deployment, continuous > >> integration/deployment, etc.). They will be working on the > >> Infrastructure as code movement and moving further and further up the > >> stack. > >> > > > > We've been hearing about "moving up the stack" in various contexts; > > remember when we heard about this in the context of the offshoring > movement > > and what we as engineers needed to do to stay relevant and employable? We > > were all going to become architects, and product managers, and ... a > whole > > bunch of other positions of which there weren't enough for everyone :) > > > > > > -roy > > > > _______________________________________________ > > Baylisa mailing list > > Baylisa at baylisa.org > > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > > > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From bferrell at baywinds.org Tue Jan 20 19:38:25 2015 From: bferrell at baywinds.org (Bruce Ferrell) Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 19:38:25 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] The Future of Systems Administrators In-Reply-To: References: <54B9B9E4.5070504@inorganic.org> <54B9C57D.80205@blacklight.net> <54BB67E9.9040000@inorganic.org> Message-ID: <54BF1F31.5030407@baywinds.org> But did you have to use orca and virtual adrian to get it done right? :) On 01/20/2015 12:42 PM, Adrian Cockcroft wrote: > I administrated a Raspberry Pi into submission a few weeks ago, spent an > hour or so. It's going to copy the current weather from my weather station > to weather underground until it gets a hardware failure and need to be > replaced, hopefully it will last a few years. Is that what you meant? > > Adrian > > On Sunday, January 18, 2015, Rob Markovic wrote: > >> With the coming wave of IoT, unfortunately, Sys Admin or not, we will all >> become AoT, Adminitrators of Things. >> >> Some of us already are, with who knows how many different devices at home. >> >> Not going away until things administer themselves. >> >> -- Rob >> >> about.me/vRobM >> [image: Rob Markovi? on about.me] >> >> >> >> On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 11:59 PM, Roy Rapoport > > wrote: >> >>> On 1/16/15 6:14 PM, Sean Hart wrote: >>> >>>> So, first off. A lot of the low level sysadmins (kernel hackers, >>>> rack-and-stackers, killer network folks, etc.) will go to huge >>>> installations like Rackspace and Joyent and AWS. They will do awesome >>>> things there. >>>> >>> Putting aside the description of rack-and-stackers as doing "awesome >>> things," I don't think it's actually accurate to say "a lot of the low >>> level" folks will end up going to Joyent, Rackspace, etc, because with >> the >>> increasing concentration of physical hardware in the hands of relatively >>> few players, the number of jobs dealing with hardware doesn't increase -- >>> it decreases for exactly the same sizing efficiencies that we as >> customers >>> then end up taking advantage of. >>> >>> The Systems folks who do software installation and configuration/tuning >>>> will pick up chef/puppet/ansible/$CONFIG_MGMT_OF_THE_WEEK, and >>>> everything will be represented as code changes. >>>> >>> Some, certainly. I brought Puppet into Netflix (and some other people >>> later brought Chef in); but it still wasn't enough to save IT from being >>> considered obsolete to production management, partially because we had so >>> many IT people mired in an old and systems-specific way of thinking about >>> what we built, and what the definition of "success" was. And that old >> way >>> is basically bankrupt -- IT has traditionally done a terrible job serving >>> its customers, I'd argue (though a fair case could be made that IT's >>> typically put in an almost impossible position where it's very unlikely >> to >>> do anything but a terrible job -- one of the reasons I'd likely retire >> from >>> the workforce rather than ever go into IT again). >>> >>> The all around, jack of all trades folks... There's a lot here, but >>>> will be mostly writing automation code of one form or another >>>> (Provisioning, install, config, deployment, continuous >>>> integration/deployment, etc.). They will be working on the >>>> Infrastructure as code movement and moving further and further up the >>>> stack. >>>> >>> We've been hearing about "moving up the stack" in various contexts; >>> remember when we heard about this in the context of the offshoring >> movement >>> and what we as engineers needed to do to stay relevant and employable? We >>> were all going to become architects, and product managers, and ... a >> whole >>> bunch of other positions of which there weren't enough for everyone :) >>> >>> >>> -roy >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Baylisa mailing list >>> Baylisa at baylisa.org >>> http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> Baylisa mailing list >> Baylisa at baylisa.org >> http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa >> > _______________________________________________ > Baylisa mailing list > Baylisa at baylisa.org > http://www.baylisa.org/mailman/listinfo/baylisa > From david at catwhisker.org Sat Jan 24 05:06:56 2015 From: david at catwhisker.org (David Wolfskill) Date: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 05:06:56 -0800 Subject: [Baylisa] Open-source-friendly laptop.... Message-ID: <20150124130656.GE1059@albert.catwhisker.org> I was recently informed of a fairly local effort to create & support an open-source-friendly laptop; I thought some folks here might be interested: If FreeBSD runs (or can be taught to run) well on it, I'll be interested. :-} Peace, david -- David H. Wolfskill david at catwhisker.org Those who murder in the name of God or prophet are blasphemous cowards. See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 949 bytes Desc: not available URL: