Joel’s Blog

Wow. Who would have though that Carolina and NY would have both lost? Now I have no idea who to pull for. I don’t really like any of the teams left …

I am going to try writing in my blog more. Not that anyone has ever visited it …

Work is going well. Things are busy but I should be thankful considering how things are going in the financial industry. We are trying to improve our processes and procedures as well as improving the reliability and performance of our systems. We are expanding to another overseas market so that likely means another trip to setup a new environment. It is good to have so many thing going on but it would be nice to have some time to explore more ways to better utilize our technology.

So. I have not updated this site in more than a year. What a difference a year makes. In that time I have left a job I had for 7 years, took a risk on a new job, and moved to a new city. I left Warren Wilson College after 7 years in July of 2007. I had some mixed emotions. WWC was the place that I grew into the career that I have and made some great friends over the years there. I was ready for a change though. I randomly applied for a Linux System Administrator job at a company I had never heard of. Automated Trading Desk is based in Mt. Pleasant, SC ( across the Cooper River from Charleston). I had no idea what the company did or anything. It almost did not happen. Something happened and a phone interview that was scheduled never happened. I decided to drop it but something made me call back after 2 weeks. I’m glad I did. I traveled down to the Lowcountry of an interview and that was it. Right after I signed the contract I heard that the company had been purchased by Citi. After a few frantic phone calls I was assured that I still had a new job. I started in July and we bought a house in August. So far things have been pretty great. The job is pretty stressful and I work a lot. I am one of 2 sys admins responsible for almost 1500 servers, 98% of which run Linux. It has been a pretty big change but I am glad I took the plunge.

The IT industry is abuzz with Virtualization. Almost every trade publication you pick up has something about virtualization. I have been bitten by the bug myself. I have managed to begin eliminating some server boxes that perform minor tasks by installing them in Virtual Machines. I have been using VMWare Server to do this. I am also experimenting with Xen hypervisor. The latest processors from Intel and AMD support virtualization out of the box. I hope to continue consolidating physical boxes into virtual ones.

Here they are in no particular order:

• Setting up public and private wireless networks using VLANs
• Evaluating Zimbra, an Open Source collaboration suite
• Investigating the usefulness of SANs for our setup
• Load balancing web, LDAP, and mail servers
• Retro-documenting things I have done over the last few years and collecting them into a web site for others like me to use. I might use a wiki for this.

I am going to try and document these things using the GNU Free Documentation License.

I’ll admit that I am a gentoo Linux junkie. I do however have a lot of experience with other Linux distributions and even BSDs. I have given Ubuntu Linux a fair try. Here’s my take:Pros

• Super easy to install (the easiest by far of any distro I have used)
• Decent look.

Cons

• It did not install a kernel capable of SMP on my PCS PentiumD system. This to me is a MAJOR flaw. A ‘noob’ user might not even know that the kernel did not support SMP essentially wasting fancy hardware.
• No development tools are installed by default. OK. I know that it is kinda easy to fix this but I had to resort to the Ubuntu Forums to figure out that installing make, gcc, etc. are not enough. You have to install the build-essential package to make all the devel things work.

As perhaps indicated by the linked article at the end of this post, the worst part for me are the ‘fanboy’ Ubuntu users. I LOVE Linux. I have used it every day for the past 7 years as my only desktop OS and on the vast majority of servers that I manage. But fanboy types get under my skin. It seems like every other article on digg is about “How Ubuntu is Teh Awesomist!” The only more annoying users are Mac fanatics. I guess the bottom line is that if more people use Linux because of Ubuntu then great. But stop talking about it so damn much. It is not the ‘best’ distribution out there (that is totally dependent on application). So my plea to the Ubuntu community is this: Please shut up.

See: http://techanchor.blogspot.com/2006/08/stfu-ubuntu-users.html

I have been a Linux user for almost 8 years now. I have been using it full time on my personal machines for about 6 years. In this time I have seen many, many improvements in Linux and related software. I was just reading some articles by John H. Terpstra about how vendors and retailers have ’sabotaged’ widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop. He makes some really good points. I know from experience that getting some devices to work has been painful. It was some time before I could use the Broadcom wireless card in my current laptop. Even now it only works through a ‘hack’ that makes the Windows© driver work in Linux. It uses a piece of software called Ndiswrapper. In a way it is really cool that some people way smarter than me can make thing like this work . On the other hand, it is dishearting that hardware vendors will not release information to Linux driver programmers so they can write native drivers. Terpstra raises some frightening possibilities about the US losing its place at the forefront of IT because of the monopoly of Microsoft©.

Well. I suppose since I have this website I should at least use it. Not much going on in my life. The mail server at work took a nosedive and crashed last week. Nothing like being at work til 3AM. Most users lost nothing but some did. The ones that did have been pretty cool about it thankfully.