Corruption and Salvation · 8 June, 06:09 AM
Phil Windley related today some lessons learned the hard way. I’ve been a big believer in his first point for a long time. There was marketing slogan for MFC back in the mid 90’s: “You are not a machine, so stop repeating yourself”. I used to keep that hung up on my wall. This was before I read the Gang of Four, before I read Refactoring, and I’ve learned that it carries over into all kinds of activities. With respect to operations, an absolute minimum is to write down everything you need to bring a new server online, starting from a clean disk. Once you’ve done that, automating the process is the next logical step, and then Phil’s other points are logical extensions of that. Maintaining a server image and managing your servers through virtual slices is just another automation step, and once you have more than one server, you have to think about load balancing.
There’s an interesting comment on Phil’s post though:
..on systems that were manned-flight rated, they always worked in pairs with one person proofing what the other admin was doing before pressing the “enter” key.
That’s kind of an interesting concept: pair administration. Funny how these Agile principles keep showing up.
— Gordon Weakliem
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