This is something I’ve always told, never got tired of it, to my students “Guys always measure twice and cut once. It’s better to spend one more week in the planning phase than having to troubleshoot problems once you have implemented something”. I think this is a basic principal of IT that can easily be applied to every other job or task out there.
It’s pretty simple, if you spend time planning something the right way you’ll get back 10 x the same time when something goes wrong, as if you are reading this blog you know stuff in IT can and will go wrong.
So here’s the story, a customer with a DHCP server running in Linux in a plain flat LAN, no VLANs no IGP nothing, basically one of the many “grown systems” where you start just with a bunch of clients and maybe 1 or 2 servers and one day you discover you have hundreds of clients and tens of server in your infrastructure… how do you call this? For me it’s lack of planning…
There is no easy escape from this kind of situation, usually the “faster” way out is just stop a second and rethink everything from scratch. I know this could sound like as the hardest and longest way to reach a stable solution but it is the one that will lead you to success without too much pain.
Back to the story, via had to decommission this setup to migrate everything under Windows, it’s a pretty standard and easy task when you have proper documentation and people that actually know how their network is setup… It is a nightmare if you work in a blind way without any documentation and without knowledge of what is hiding behind the corner. You switch off a service and BAM everything falls on you and you are forced to quickly restore the previous condition.
I’ll make this short, some people think planning and writing documentation is boring, trust me it is not if you approach it with the right attitude, or not needed “I can remember anything” but trust me the difference between success and disaster is just that PROPER planning. I’ve been in the industry for so much time I’ve seen situations like this too many times and it is never funny.
Think about it the next time someone asks you to write some documentation, it could save your life.
Take this as a free advice from some who have learned this the hard way.
Good morning all, i'm sorry for the long silence due to work problems and to my relocation to a new house, I'm almost back in my usual workplace (I've been out of town for some time) and finally had back my internet connection in the new house, what a shame as a network engineer I had to wait more than 2 weeks for a local supplier to finally send me my DSL router without which I could not connect :S
Hopefully between today and tomorrow I'll finally be able to post the third part of the series on how to emulate Junos on GNS3 so stay tuned!
Well it finally happened, yesterday my blog completely crashed and I was forced to reinstall everything from scratch. I’ve lost just a few posts (that I’ve been able to successfully restore from an old backup) but I’m still in the process of recovering the old settings, features and plugins.
Probably during the next few days you’ll notice theme changes and missing functionalities, this is planned and I’m working on this part but please if you notice something missing from the old blog just let me know, it will help me out spotting stuff that I forgot.
I think I’ll just stick with this theme as it is easier to configure/maintain and I want to fully concentrate on content of the posts rather than on tweaking the design which for me is a time consuming process.
Hello all, I'm writing just to let you know I've gone through a review on my post about how to install TinyPM on CentOS adding some missing pieces and disabling the syntax highlight for the posted code as it was causing a problem in the post format that made most of the code I've written unreadable.
I think it's better to have less eye candy but properly formatted code, that you can just copy and paste, rather than the other way around
Hope you'll find this useful, but I'm always here so please just ask for any problem or doubt!
So the time has finally come, I am in the no return zone. My RHCE exam is knocking at the door, and I’ve started my final (hopefully!) review.
My exam has a really unfortunate story as for a reason or another I was forced to reschedule it four times and still don’t know if there will be a fifth as I’m waiting a confirmation from Red Hat if my exam will be available in English or will be just in plain German as I would like not to fail the exam just because I don’t understand what they are asking me.
The review is started, I cannot stand the pressure anymore, I’m not the patient kind of person… I’m more like “Ok let’s do that, NOW!” more or less like that, I don’t spend countless hours thinking and rethinking about a decision… this is a dangerous way of living more often than not but I like it, I like the adrenaline, I like the pain often you get from doing stuff in such a kamikaze way, I love the feeling of being successful or, in case you fail, the doubled effort you put in what you’ve chosen to do…
That is me, so you’ll understand why all this waiting and rescheduling is killing me, RHCE is something I started long ago, put a lot of effort in it and probably won’t change my (professional) life as I already do most of the stuff any Linux Systems Engineer does and of course we don’t need a certificate to tell the world we are good in what we do in our job, but again this is the old dilemma of personal VS professional (aka what the market asks to the IT guys around the world) and I’ve already blogged about this and don’t mean to spend more words on this subject even if I would like to hear your opinion about this.
What’s on the horizon? Well for sure some Apache, sorry for all of you Apache lovers, but it is not my favorite subject and in total honesty I don’t work with it a lot so my skills on that part of the world are a bit rusty.
Next moving fast to some more ACLs, talking of the extended ACLs of course, as this is another of those things that I don’t work a lot with and refreshing memory is always good.
Last but not least SELINUX and IPTABLES, while the latter is the standard firewall in the Linux world and I can manage it pretty easily I did not work with it in a long long time, in Enterprise we of course use different solutions, and I want to refresh on this compartment as well. SELINUX is a totally different beast, I don’t work in an high security context and most of our applications are custom developed internally on platform != from Red Hat, so basically no SELINUX or I simply disable it.
That should be it, that’s the attack plan, of course always if Red Hat will take the time to reply to my mail confirming me the exam language and address (yes you read that well, when I got the confirmation of the exam reschedule I did not get the address of where the exam will be proctored, well actually I got the address of the Italian Center not of much use here in Zurich, so I’m not even sure where I have to go).
This is more or less the attack plan, what’s next after this I don’t know to be honest. I would love to nail everything up to the RHCA level but I doubt this is going to happen for two main reasons :
-Lack of study material. Yes I know most of the RHCA Exam syllabus is just out there (LDAP and such) but I think everyone will agree on this, having an “official” guide to follow is something totally different than hunting down for study material which could even prove wrong… Already happened to me to put a lot of effort on studying a particular area for an exam just to find out that was useless.
-Second reason is money/time and directly bound to the first one. As probably you already know Red Hat has a huge offer of official course for the RHCE/RHCA path but they cost a lot of money, and personally can’t invest all that money at the moment, and needs you to be away from the office for extended time… and I have to pay everything out of my pocket and don’t that much time to attend a 5 days course at my will.
I would love to see some RHCA CBT out there, that would be great, and I would be more than glad to spend my money on self paced training, but the only one available out there is the one from CBT Planet and I would like to have some feedback on this before spending circa 2000$ on that (sorry CBT Planet don’t hate me for this, I have no experience with your material so I think my doubt is legitimate).
So I still don’t have an exact idea of what will be next… Of course I have my MCITP Database and Virtualization Administrator certification to complete, but that’s Microsoft stuff and pretty easy for me (due to the extended experience in the field)…
So we will see.
Sorry if I stole you so much time but the blog it’s a wonderful way for me to put order in my thoughts and try to focus on the path in front of me.
Wish me good luck, I will for sure need it and as always if you have any suggestion please don’t be shy and let me know it, I will appreciate it.
Lethe.
***UPDATE*** Well I've got an official reply from Red Hat about my exam and it seems it will be in English, thanks god I don't have to reschedule it otherwise I would get a price or something for having rescheduled the exam so many time
Even if in my career I've been working a lot more with Red Hat based distribution I cannot ignore Debian 17th birthday and the power and stability of such a wonderful distribution that I've often used on my machines and servers.
apt-get is and will always be the best to my eyes, sorry rpm but you can't win this one.
VMware just released the latest vsion of its Workstation product, VMware workstation 7.1.1, the main added feature of this new release is the full support for vSpehere 4.1 as a guest operating system.
This is great even if I've been running all kind of ESX/vSphere a virtual machine for a long time it always been a bit trciky to have it up and running and sometimes with some stability issues
Seeing that VMware is commited to support even the latest version is vSphere is great as this makes it possible to run your labs and study the product without having a spare server just for that.
It would be even better if VMware could lift the enforcement to attend their official course to be able to get certified, this is really a pity in my eyes for all those people, like me, who don't have the money nor the time to attend courses…
I have tons of exams in my career experience and all of them were done on self study backed up by lab and genuine knowledge, so why VMware can't just do the same and let people get the certificate without spending 2+k Euros on their official course which, in my case, did not teach me anything as I was more prepared than the trainer himself?
Today I took sometime to reintroduce a feature that was implemented with the old theme but was incompatible with the one I'm using right now, this is my bad sorry, but that helped out to figure out what to write and better know your opinion about the material, the rating system.
For every post and/or page you'll find a "Thumb Up/Down" and "Star rating" so that you can let me know if you like or not a post.
This is not only an eye candy for posts it is an integral and important part of maintaining the blog and getting a feedbackup from my readers so if you happen to reada post but have no time to write a comment, or like me you're too lazy, take the time to rate it… It will take only 3 seconds to do so
As promised and planned some time ago I'm introducing some news in the blog, not only I'm trying to write a bit more and try to finalize the Video part of the blog but I'm introducing a lot of new content in the different technologies areas so don't be surprise or upset if coming here you'll find some posts about stuff that is not Linux nor Cisco
I'm introducing posts with tips and tricks for Microsoft technologies as well, as I said in a previous post I'm more exposed to working with Microsoft stuff at the moment and I think some people will benefit from the posts in the Microsoft section as well.
Don't be afraid I'm always the same Lethe, my passion and my main tasks are still bound to Open World, but this is a blog about technology and no matter what I love all aspects of the technology. I will continue to promote and support Open Source technologies and activities but like it or not Microsoft technologies are out there and most of us are using them and I hope this blog will help those of you who are facing problems with this side of the world
The other day I was talking with a fellow moderaton on sadikhov.com forum of my current and future projects and what I'm studying, well trying at least, at the moment.
Lot of stuff to be honest, Sharepoint 2010, SQL which has always been my weak spot as I never took the time to learn it properly, RHCE well not properly studying here but just keepin an eye on my exam approaching and the Microsoft virtualization track… And as the post title implies he wrote me "…It seems that you have a finger in every pie…"
That made me think, a lot to be honest. I always took this, all this, as normal routine but for once I stopped to think about it and asked myself maybe it is too much? Maybe there are other things in life you should enjoy? Maybe you want to be yet another Jack of all trades? Does is it really worth the effort?
To be honest I still did not find an answer to my own questions but I think yeah it is indeed true I have a finger in every pie but I don't do this to be yet another Jack of all Traders, I do this just because I always need to know more and specially I hate to be ignorant on this or that thing specially then these are bound to what I do on daily basis (read SQL is behind Sharepoint, Hyper-V is behind the virtualization plans we have, Cisco is… well passion and behind all the above )
As per being worth… I don't really know, I don't do this for money but all these piece of papers took me where I am now and who know maybe they could take me even further far than this… so in my mind it is absolutely worth the effort, it was not worth in Italy where I was just a certification machine used and underpaid… it's a totally different story now that my company could not care less about my certifications but can appreciate my skills…
I'm sorry to bother you with this kind of posts but writing is the best way to have your own questions answered, at least for me so I guess I'll just keep having a finger in every pie and even more fingers is possible at all… it's funny and rewarding at the same time.
This is something I’ve always told, never got tired of it, to my students “Guys always measure twice and cut once. It’s better to spend one more week in the planning phase than having to troubleshoot problems once you have implemented something”. I think this is a basic principal of IT that can easily be applied to every other job or task out there.
