Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> Compromise
>
> ,----[ Quote
> | Since most senior managers know that people are people first and
> | professionals second, they understand that people who see Linux as the
> | biggest threat to their social and economic well being aren’t going to
> | prove its value by making it work cheaply and reliably, and so they
> | usually agree to bring in some new people. But what happens? The IT
> | people prevail at implementation time -getting senior management to
> | compromise on responsibility because IT management argues that they’re
> | not Windows experts, they’re Computer Professionals - and besides
> | they’ve got the big gun, the ultimate self fulfilling prophecy: the fact
> | that they can’t find properly qualified Linux staff.
> |
> | The inevitable result, of course, is that Linux proves to be as
> | unreliable, difficult to use, and expensive to support as they said it
> | would be - leaving the organization nicely inoculated against the next
> | attempt to introduce a more efficient technology.
> `----
>
> http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/?p=911
>
Not wanting to be anti-MS-IT-Staff, but I think everyone in this buisiness
knows already that on average UNIX/Linux IT folk tend to be more switched
on to IT tasks.
We don't expect or go looking for ready made solutions to all problems, it
is nice when a distro does do some of the grafting for you, for example
SLES with Yast. But still, I think that most of us are happy to get our
hands dirty. In fact I would go further and say that is essential to the
sort of minds that are attracted to become UNIX/Linux managers, otherwise
we would find it dull.
But having said that I don't know of any UNIX/Linux IT person who doesn't
get great pride out of the fact that they have very little or no down time.
Some of that comes from the IT person foreseeing problems. About 98% of all
server problems give a warning before they are a risk. Not necessarily a
direct log entry, but using the standard 'Know how your system looks and
behaves when it is good, then you will see when it is going bad long before
the problem can bother the users'.
So each day I start with a skip around my servers, same pattern each day,
Skip through the logs looking for oddities. Not all problems are direct,
but you get used to pattern searching, things that are wrong stand out.
df -af : Again pattern searching, I know what it should look like on
each server and I know how quickly it changes. A volume that I have arrange
to never change unless I do it, 1% increase or decrease and I'm onto it.
netstat .... and verious other regular daily checks. The whole thing is less
than 15 minutes.
But it means I get to treat and diagnose any problem very early. That in
turn has given me a down time record of 8 hours in 4 years and two
lightening strikes account for most of that.
Now, I do have to deal with quite a few Windows IT staff. Some are very
clever, some are absolute crap. But there is one thing that they all have
in common. They all wait for the problem/fault/errors to arise before they
go looking for them.
That to me is the main difference between the Windows IT mentallity and the
UNIX/Linux mentality. It is also a major part of the reason why MS Win
servers have such a bad reputation in the general office environment.
I have no doubt at all that many of the Windows server problems could be
foreseen in the same way as Linux server problems, but they simply do not
do it. Even as I lecture them to try to get them motivated into wanting
fantastic uptime records, I know by the look they give that 'This is not
the Windows way to do things'.
Downtime costs money, Windows gets lots of down time, Linux gets very
little, it doesn't get very little because our hardware is better, it gets
very little because it attracts the sort of staff that are willing to put
in the effort early in order to save them the sleepless nights at a later
date.
Do you know any Windows IT people? Well ask them a question, ask them how
confident they are that they can recover their full system from the backup.
Offer them one hundred pounds to perform the full recovery 'now', so that
they down't get a chance to doctor the backup, you want them to recover
their normal daily backup tape. I bet you both socks they wont take that
bet. I didn't offer £100 (I'm a poor IT person) but I have offered a slap
up indian meal many times, but never had to buy it.
How can they do that? What sort of mentality does it take for an IT person
to sit there day after day, not knowing if their backup tapes can be used
to bring the system and data back to how it was at the time of last nights
backup? Could you live like that, I know I couldn't. I have had many a
sleepless night over IT problems over the years, but I will never be caught
without my safetynet, and I am certain that the vast majority of UNIX/Linux
IT folk are the same.
How about Budgets then.
My budget here, when I arrived they had a massive IT budget, it was sort of
assumed that IT costs a lot and there's no choice but to pay it. Within a
year I had cut the IT budget to less than a quarter and improved uptime,
and put in place a very secure set of safetynets which are tested
regularly. I can sleep at night very well.
So this nonsense about Windows IT being cheaper than Linux IT, is pure crap.
Yes the staff will cost more in salery, but the savings from uptime and
hardware costs make it an excellent investment.
But all of this uptime generates a problem unique to UNIX/Linux. There is a
mentality in general management that if the servers and computers are not
going wrong then the IT staff are not doing anything. They have an idea
that we only work when they is a problem on the system.
I think I have convinced mine over many years, but I could understand if
others around the world are having more trouble convincing their management
that the fact that they have a lot of uptime is proof that the IT folk are
doing their job, downtime is a failure of the IT task. This again comes
from a Windows-like mentality, where the system goes down, the IT person
turns up and fixes it, then they proclaim him/her a hero for fixing the
system. I tell them though that he/she isn't a hero, he/she failed to keep
their network in proper working order, some problems are inevitable, but if
you see your IT staff firefighting a lot, they are doing a crap job of
looking after your system. (I'm not very popular at IT staff parties).
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