Short questions get long answers, sometimes
October 17, 2009
I got woken up at 5am this morning. One of the Oracle databases had nearly run out of tablespace, and Nagios was letting me know. I’m going to have to script an auto-tablespace add thing at some point, but of course as soon as I do that, we’ll move away from the antique version (8i) we’re running and get something modern. Actually, it would probably be worth it just for that. Anyway, I’m digressing.
I wasn’t able to go back to sleep after being jolted awake like that, so I was browsing my familiar haunts and saw a question on the /r/sysadmin subreddit. It’s an interesting question for a couple of reasons. One, from a technical standpoint, the person is going to be dealing with a lot of fun toys. On the other hand, learning the amount that the person will have to in a couple of months is next to hopeless.
Anyway, let me repost the question here, and my answer, which I posted there in two parts, because it was past the 100,000 character limit.
Hello everybody,
in a month or two I will receive a blade rack and a normal rack , both full of servers with different architectures and all of them with 2 or 3 different purposes.
The blades will be homogeneous, all of them will have the same hardware, and sometimes I will have to change their OS from centos, to debian and to windows. Different kinds of rendering = different OS.
On the other hand I will have a dell rack, with some dell machines pe2900,pe2950, and some intel machines with nehalem chips. Also for rendering and investigation purposes. I will need to be able to change the OS as easy and fast as possible.
So I was thinking…, my knowledge about this stuff is not that much, lets ask some advice.
I’ll be glad to read some suggestions about software, distribution, how to manage the data, backups , snmp, dhcp on this pool, if PXE is needed, what happens with the bonding, how to deploy the software, how to have a plug and play cluster for cpu processing, ….. and I guess something else will appear.
many thanks.
As you can see, wow. All kinds of technology, and not a _lot_ of time to learn it in.
If anyone has any advice on compute clusters, it really sounds like he could use the help. Go reply and give him some advice, if you could.
Since I couldn’t sleep, I decided to write a Tolstoy. Here’s my (probably overly hopeful) reply
EDIT
I thought better of pasting a 2000 word reply on here. My reply is at the link above, if you want to read it.
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October 17th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Matt, that was a a great reply. One moment while I go upvote it. Okay, I’m back. I really feel for that poor guy/gal. I hope (s)he survives.
October 17th, 2009 at 9:40 am
K, wow. He/she/it/xu better be getting a decent compensation for that, or be part of a team. Doing that standalone style would NOT be pleasant…
October 19th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Sounds like he may want to re-evaluate what he’s looking to do. Sometimes you get mired in trying to figure out how to make one solution work when a completely different approach would make everything trivial.
It also sounds like there are a number of variables left out of the question. He’s talking about rendering but doesn’t mention what software is going going to be managing the jobs that these systems are running for example.
If you are going to constantly be needing all three OS’s mentioned, you could be better off leaving a few machines on each OS permanently.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:21 am
Wow, nice reply Matt.
Been reading your blog for a while, really enjoy it. This is my first comment
Keep those thoughts coming…