Something needs to be done!
November 10, 2009
Yesterday, I mentioned that my life outside of work is going to be busier soon. I think it’s time to expound on that a little bit.
I have always been a proponent of small infrastructure administrators. I think we get the short end of the stick in a lot of ways. We carry all of the responsibility, we get all of the grief, we work long hours, and we typically only get noticed when things go wrong. To top it all off, we invent our own solutions, because to listen to the hardware vendors, you need tens of thousands of dollars to make your network and servers work right! I don’t buy it.
I kept thinking about the various infrastructures that I’ve worked on and that I’ve seen. Things were done differently in small networks, even though the goal of stability was the same. If you’ve only got a few servers, you need them to be there and functioning just as much as someone who has 200 does. Probably more. And think about the sheer number of small networks in the world, compared to large networks. Why isn’t there documentation for these infrastructures?
I thought about it a lot, and I decided that the time had come to do something about it. I researched for several months, learning how to write a technical book. I listened to authors like Tom Limoncelli and Brian K Jones and anyone else who would talk to me. I bounced ideas off of people, and I wrote proposals. I worked with publishers on the idea, and gradually narrowed down the concepts to what I wanted.
On Friday, two days before the LISA conference, I signed a deal to publish “Small Infrastructure Administration: Network Infrastructure”. This is planned to be the first of three books on the Small Infrastructure topic, the other two being “Physical Infrastructure” and “Host Infrastructure”. Each book is planned at around 250-300 pages. The publisher is Simple Talk Publishing, and they’re actually the same publisher of my monthly columns.
Between the books and the columns, I have a feeling that I’m going to be writing more than admining in the near future. It’s a good thing I have a junior admin to help out, because there’s not enough time to do everything I need to. But then, there never is.
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November 10th, 2009 at 11:10 am
Congratulations
November 10th, 2009 at 11:17 am
My best wishes, i’m sure you’re going to write an excellent book and i’m looking forward to read it
November 10th, 2009 at 11:22 am
I’m just jealous. I always wanted to do that.
November 10th, 2009 at 11:39 am
Lol for a second then I thougt you where joining club daddy aka club chaos
I here books pay more than ankle biters do
November 10th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
As a small business sysadmin myself, I look forward to reading your book to see if there is more I can be doing at my job.
November 10th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Congrats on signing the deal!
November 10th, 2009 at 1:05 pm
Congrats, Matt. Free, autographed copies to your most loyal readers, right?
November 10th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Congratulations!
November 10th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Thanks everyone for the kind words of encouragement! I can’t wait to get the books done and get feedback on them. I’m hoping they end up as a useful resource, and I’m writing them with that intent.
Ben: I can’t promise free books to loyal readers, but I promise I’ll sign one if someone puts it in front of me!
November 10th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Congratulations Matt! That’s excellent to hear! Let’s hope you can get them published for the Kindle as well.
November 10th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Great news, Matt! Good luck with your writing!
November 10th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Congratulations on your new project.
I agree with the small vs. large infrastructure. All the Microsoft Best Practices and every other administration book reiterate the same large infrastructure mentality.
If I had a server for every role, I’d have about as many servers as employees!
November 10th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Great to hear Matt! I’ll be in line for that book… or at least waiting for it to appear on Safari. (Oh wait… did Safari pick up Simple Talk books yet? Hmmm…) However, I wonder what constitutes a “small network” in your experience versus mine. So far, my technical career has been mostly in very small environments. Like… so small they don’t even have servers. For instance, homes offices or places that use dormant desktop PCs commandeered for some kind of “server” role. One office I do most of my work for just bought a second server to install SBS 2008 on and that’s the largest place I do consistent work for. Now those are some small infrastructures.
From what I’ve seen of your work environment as I’ve followed you over time, you’ve got an absolutely massive environment… compared to the ones I work in. you actually have server racks and WANs (and enough servers and users to need those things too). And I’m a little jealous about that. =)
Nonetheless, I’ll look forward to your writings as I’m sure I can learn plenty from them.
November 10th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
/me hangs head in shame for snarling up my formatting in the previous post. Ignore the semi-random emboldened text.
November 11th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Congrats again! Can’t wait to see it hit the shelves.
November 11th, 2009 at 11:05 am
Congratulations of the Book deal, Matt.
I look forward to reading them!
November 11th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Thank God, I have been looking for this book for years!
November 11th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Congrats! Good luck with the books. If you need any insight on keeping a k-12 network going with no budget for the books, let me know.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Nice! Congratulations Matt! I will read it when it comes out.
November 19th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Yay!! I still want that honorable mention!
May 14th, 2010 at 12:01 am
[...] accepted as a USENIX blogger at the LISA conference, I finalized an agreement with a publisher to write a book focusing on Small Infrastructure Administration (technically the first of three books, if [...]