Yesterday was Sysadmin Day, the one day per year where you get to show your thanks for the people who set up your PC and network and keep everything working to bring you all of the things you use your PC for. Thats the Internet, E-Mail, your word processor and maintain the networks which allow you to watch Youtube and so on.

We’re the people who answer the phone at 2am on Sunday morning when the E-Mail server dies and we go in to work to fix it. We’re the people who get to ferret around under your desk, dealing with your irritation and frustration at not being able to do what you want as you stuff your face with your lunch while we fix your problem at 1:15 pm, dizzy with hunger, because you did something stupid. We’re the people that Administer the Systems, thats the servers, the networks, the desktop computers. We’re the people that stop you getting spam, viruses, we weigh up thousands of options, possibilities and alternatives to bring you the best service we can and you only bitch when it goes wrong.

And yesterday was your day to say thank you. And I bet you didn’t, but I guess you didn’t realise. I’ve long told people that as a Sysadmin, people don’t really care whether I live or die until something goes wrong, in which case they would like to execute over the phone. It wouldn’t hurt you to show your thanks when one of my fellow Sysadmins saves your day as very few people ever do. It’s a job where people don’t know you exist while things are going well, they only know about you when things go wrong, so in many cases it’s the Chinese doctor approach – it’s my job to make sure it doesn’t become ill, which is of course impossible, just a sliding scale of reducing problems to a minimum. There is a great page on how to help save your sysadmin’s time.

Just say thank you next time and let your sysadmin eat their lunch in peace.

So as I said, I installed Fedora 7 and that I’d complain later. Well I installed F7 on a decent box to play with Kerberos, SELinux, LDAP, to give Fedora a shot to see what it’s like on the other side of the fence and to play with stuff like Evolution and a load of other apps which I’ve never given a chance (Evolution irritates me for a number of reasons so I’ve never used it properly). Fedora are doing some cool stuff and I’d like to familiarise myself with some of the stuff that would be useful at work and useful in the future. Besides I think Red Hat are putting together a fearsome stack of middleware, which doesn’t mean so much to me at the moment, but maybe it should and maybe it will in the future.

It seems like a really nice desktop and the theme is great, though I thought the FC6 theme was nicer. I took the tougher path by leaving SELinux in enforcing mode and it hasn’t been a problem yet apart from when it wouldn’t let kadmind, the Kerberos admin daemon touch it’s own log file and after a bit of dithering, I took the SELinux Troubleshooter’s advice and ran restorecon -v /var/log/kadmind.log which solved the problem, guess I should look at what that actually does and whether it’s a bad thing from a security point of view.

A few things I noticed about Fedora:

• No graphical package manager, or none that I can find.

Why not? Ok, well maybe I missed it out in the installer, I picked all of my own packages. Most people including me know that I can use yum or install synaptic or whatever else the Fedora people use, but well that means people who are new to Linux won’t have a clue what to do to install stuff. Most people don’t know how to search google in way that gets them a specific technical answer, such as how to install software on Fedora. It’s only one thing, but I think this might be among the reasons why Ubuntu seems to be getting more of the new users. Aside from getting it’s name in the headlines and into people’s heads, these things are easy straight off in Ubuntu. Maybe grabbing new users isn’t part of Fedora’s primary objectives, but it ought to be. New Linux users mean mind share, exposure, community and developers and contributors of the future.

• The fonts don’t look as good as Ubuntu.

Don’t know why that is, they appear to use the same font and the same rendering scheme. It’s a trivial issue but one that bugs me.

• Gnome starts fast as hell.

Almost immediately after login, I have a desktop. Unbelievable. No splash screen or anything.

• No installer CD iso

DVD or a Live CD only. This isn’t a biggie but it took a few mins to figure out. On my designated flaky client machines for my Kerberos etc test setup, they only have 256MB RAM, a 2GHz Celeron and a CD drive, no DVD drive, the Live CD craaaaaaaaawls, I’m talking 20-30 seconds for the next step to load from the CD after clicking the Next button. This might be a flaky CD drive though. The installer makes me initialise the swap partition immediately after creation, which is cool by me but later on, the system froze (flaky hardware I suspect) and so I decided to enable the swap partition as soon as I could after the Live CD booted to make the system more responsive, but then the installer kept bailing saying that my swap partition hasn’t been initialized and that I should click OK to reboot, which I dutifully did and left the machine to reboot. Three apparent reboots and 3 aborted installs later and the installer is still saying the same thing, so now I come to the conclusion that clicking OK to reboot isn’t making the machine reboot, so I’ll have to struggle on with no swap and imagine what I could have done with my wasted evening had the machine rebooted when I clicked OK, as the label suggested.

I should abandon my flaky hardware and just use it as an opportunity to try Xen virtual machines as my client machines, but I want to try out real physically networked hardware to make sure my thing is working as I expect, rather than being some fluke which is down to the fact that things are working by being on the same physical machine. I want the packets to go across the wires. I also don’t want to have to learn too many new subjects as once, which might mean I start to forget details as it all merges into one. It also means I won’t fall into the trap where if something doesn’t work I don’t have to dig into several software stacks that I don’t understand to see which one is causing the issue.

• Fedora has some great GUI tools which make fiddly things simple.

Like switching MTA without having to fiddle with the alternatives command. I did that once for a self-compiled Exim install on FC4 and it was a pain in the ass. Like having an authentication configuration tool to turn on stuff like Kerberos and LDAP authentication. Like GUI tools to manage DNS, Apache and NFS (though I prefer the raw config files for each of these). Fedora make some of the more complicated stuff easy. No more fiddling with PAM, though I will be doing things the hard way. I could at least do it the easy way and then see what the config files look like afterwards.

• With a little knowledge, Fedora isn’t as package shallow as it might seem

The one thing that has always bugged me about almost every non-Debian based distribution is the package manager and the depth of the repositories. Hand’s down apt and .debs push yum and .rpms into the ground, but yum is usable. It’s a bit irritating how it updates the package lists every time you touch it, but yum is ok. It’s the depth of the repositories that bugs me more. On Debian and Ubuntu (with Universe) you have around 19,000 packages. On Fedora you have a few thousand and that doesn’t include a lot of the things I want in my repositories. It seems that Fedora has quite a few 3rd party repos, such atrpms, thatfleminggent (formerly Enlartenment), livna, dag wieers and so on, you just have to know about them and then work out how to set them up. Once you’ve done it then you’re cool, but it’s still an irritation that you have to trust 3rd party packages, albeit well respected ones. The thing is though, I’ve found that the 3rd party repos tend to install their packages over the official ones where they overlap when you update and in some cases cause dependency problems, so you either have to install what you want and then disable the 3rd party repos and track 3rd party updates for sensitive packages or just live with a mixed system and sometimes broken dependency situation. Maybe I’m just a crap Fedora user.

• Fedora machines never seem to power down

I’ve never seen one power off and I have 50 at work. They always seem to say they have powered off but don’t. The first version of Ubuntu, Warty, did this, the second, Breezy didn’t. Thats around 2 years ago. Debian hasn’t done this as long as I have used it (Potato was my first I think) and people say Debian is behind the times. Maybe this is a kernel patch that Fedora doesn’t ship for ideological reasons. I don’t know but it gets on my nerves.

Note to Fedora/RH users before they start blowing flames into my comments: I’m happy to hear you tell me how I should be doing it this way rather than that way. Take these comments as coming from an Ubuntu desktop and Fedora/Red Hat/Centos CLI user. I’ve no recent experience of using Fedora as a desktop.

Well thats all for now, more when I’m not pissed off with waiting for a stupid ass machine to install all night.

OK so I have a few seconds to breathe. I finished my last CCNA 2nd semester exam on Tuesday and aced it, which cheered me up as I hadn’t really prepared as well as I should have done.

Since my CCNA is over until September, LUG Radio is on a break for the summer and the extraordinary month or so of late nights spent emailing people to organise LUG Radio Live is over, I’ve decided to spend my newly found few spare hours swotting up on new stuff that has been bugging me to investigate it for the last year or two, that’s stuff like Kerberos, LDAP, Xen, SELinux and giving Fedora a good shot at my desktop amongst other things. Who knows, I might even get around to doing some more work testing Jokosher, finish setting up my home studio, setting up an Asterisk box and finally learn Python.

Red Hat and Fedora are really rocking in some cool ways at the moment, they have nailed down things which I’m still waiting to see as part of the distribution on Ubuntu like Xen, SELinux and so on. I think the RH/F way on the server is a lot more straight forward too. It was discussed on a LUG Radio episode (one I wasn’t on I think, like that narrows it down…), whether distros offer all of their work to the wider community or whether they keep stuff in house. For the life of me, I could never understand why other distros didn’t use the Mandrake installer back in the day when installers were all text mode only and I still can’t understand why a lot of distros haven’t borrowed Red Hat’s setup tool, y’know, the setup command, not the installer. It makes life so much easier to configure which services run at boot than reading the man page for update-rc.d every time. Ok so maybe it’s easier when you do it on a daily basis, but I shouldn’t have to carry around in my head how to do that when I can run setup and tick boxes. All of the split config for Exim and Apache pisses me off too, it doesn’t need to be that hard. Oh yeah and the last Ubuntu servers I used fell over almost daily, so I replaced them. No more stability problems 🙂

So yeah I installed Fedora 7 on a spare machine and set about configuring Kerberos and some other stuff, I’m kinda stuck now though cos my designated client machines (a couple of flaky cast-off machines) are being flaky and keep croaking during the install. I put this down to bad hardware than a bad installer, but it’s irritating. I’ll complain about this in another post.

So, yeah, having freed up some time, I’ve suitably filled it again but at least it feels like I’m doing something I think is valuable and rewarding. I get bored if I don’t have something to work on or something to learn.

See you in the Experts Lounge.

Received in a logwatch email from one of my servers today:

--------------------- Fortune Begin ------------------------

You will have a long and unpleasant discussion with your supervisor.

---------------------- Fortune End -------------------------

🙁

Hi everyone. Well the title says it all. I guess people are waiting for me to post about LUG Radio Live 2007, the announcement of Ade’s departure, LUG Radio Live USA, Adam Sweet’s Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza and what it’s like to stand up in front of 300 people wearing only a thong and so on. Well I just don’t have time to at the moment but I might soon-ish. The same goes for everyone who has been sending me Facebook invitations.

I’ll get around to them soon.

Is this weekend!

If you haven’t bought tickets already, you can still get them on the door. It kicks off this Friday night with the annual meet and drink at the Hogshead pub in Wolverhampton city centre. Then, 10am Saturday morning the doors at the Light House Media Centre in Wolverhampton city centre will open and all of you smelly, unwashed geeks will get chance to gawp appreciatively at the God’s of Internet podcasting… The rest of the LUG Radio team and I will also be there, with the talks schedule starting at 11am.

The day runs through ’til 6pm on Saturday, when we recover ourselves before reconvening for a night of careless abandon at the Light House, drinking until someone falls asleep upside down, while their friends dance badly to the Macarena.

We then meet again at 10am Sunday, nursing sore heads and hurt pride for another day of geekfoolery, before throwing in the towel and taking our sorry selves home, knowing we had a kick ass weekend. That is unless you follow the hardcore amongst us down to one of the hotels for a relaxing Sunday evening wind-down beer.

I didn’t get chance to blog this before as I was swamped and then away on holiday, but the follow up to the Freedom March video was released. I present the second LRL 2007 trailer:

Don’t Listen Alone

This really was a lot of fun to make.

Also, Roger Light (aka Oojah) produced a spoof on the Freedom March video, entitled :

The One Man Freedom March

Absolutely brilliant. That’s all his own hair too, somehow.

All the details you need are at http://www.lugradio.org/live/

See you at the weekend.

Got back from a week away on Saturday and back to work today. I didn’t realise how worn down I was, well, actually I did because I felt it, but I didn’t realise how far from normal I was. I’ve been like a zombie for the last 2 months or so, I’ve been pulling late nights at work, trying to get my Cisco CCNA semester 2 finished and helping organise LUG Radio Live 2007. It’s been an exhausting few months.

So, now I’m back in the saddle and it’s all about to happen, my CCNA stuff is all due within the next 2 weeks, it’s LUG Radio Live this weekend and most of my critical work stuff has been done. So, it’s still chaos as I’ll be occupied for at least the next 2 weeks almost 24 hours a day but it will then be over until the new LUG Radio season starts and my 3rd Cisco semester kicks of later in the year.

See you on the other side, gringo.