IT Infrastructure and Software Development from the Customer's Perspective
I use Bacula to back up my servers and desktop/laptop computers. It’s always bugged me that I didn’t have a little icon on my Ubuntu desktop showing the status of the backup: whether it was running or not and some indication of progress. Most backup systems have this. In Bacula it’s called the tray monitor. The configuration file documentation seemed straightforward, but it took a lot of fiddling to get it right.
I think I have a fairly typical situation:
Here’s what I did to get the tray monitor to work (read my notes below before you start cutting and pasting the following into your configuration):
`sudo apt-get install bacula-traymonitor`
`Monitor {
Name = backup02-mon Password = "Monitor-Password" RefreshInterval = 5
seconds}Client { Name = pacal-mon Address =
pacal.pender.jadesystems.ca FDPort = 9102 Password =
"Monitor-Password"}``# Restricted Director, used by
tray-monitor to get the# status of the file daemonDirector { Name =
backup02-mon Password = "Monitor-Password" Monitor = yes}``sudo service bacula-fd restart`
`# Restricted console used by tray-monitor to get the status of the director``Console {`` Name = backup02-mon`` Password = "Monitor-Password"`` CommandACL = status, .status``}`
`sudo bconsole reload exit `
`bacula-tray-monitor -c /etc/bacula/tray-monitor.conf`
Then I made a menu item for it. I put it in Applications-> System Tools.
Notes:
I’m looking for an open source friendly accounting company to do my taxes and give me advice. The only reason I need a Windows box anymore is to do my accounting, since most accountants want their clients to use Windows-based software.
I typed something into Google to see if I could find an accounting firm that was open source friendly. I got one of those bogus pages that’s just scraped together from bits of the internet by a computer program. Sleaze-balls put up sites like this to try to get you to land there from a search and then click on a link, generating ad revenue for the sleaze-ball.
The thing was, it took me a few moments to realize the page for what it was. It almost looked like a real site dedicated to open source accounting software. I thought, “wow, this sleaze-ball software is getting pretty good.”
The I realized that it could also be that so many sites on the Internet are still so bad, that a computer can do as good a job as a person.
(Is this a variant of the Turing Test?)
It occurred to me that there’s an easy way for CFOs and CEOs to use the cloud right now, without waiting for the IT department to touch a single piece of equipment. Here’s how:
Ask your IT department how many servers and how much data you have. (Ask how much data is actually being used, not how much capacity you have.) Then, go to Amazon’s site for cloud services and calculate how much it would cost to host that on Amazon. Finally, call in the CIO and ask her why your IT infrastructure budget is a lot higher than what it would cost to host on Amazon. It will be. You’re asking for the whole infrastructure budget, not just the cost of the equipment.
For example, suppose you have 460 Windows servers and 200 TBs of data. Amazon has different prices for different size servers, but start by assuming all your servers are what Amazon calls “large”. Your annual cost for that (October, 2010) is $2.5M. That includes 400 Mbps of network traffic into and out of the data centre 24 hours per day.
Ask your CIO out what services you’re getting that justify the premium you pay for having an in-house IT infrastructure department.
In reality, you’re CIO’s no dummy. She’ll be able to give you a pretty good story about why the IT infrastructure budget is so much. That’s when you can use an independent IT consultant who’s not owned by a company selling the infrastructure that drives up your costs. The real value comes when you start to use the benchmark cost of Amazon to identify and drive improvements in the value provided by your infrastructure department.
For example, when your CIO is talking about the services she provides, ask her when she’s going to offer servers that can be spun up by a user, through a web site, with no intervention at all from the IT infrastructure group, like on Amazon? Or when the business will be able to downsize how much it’s paying if it discovers that it doesn’t need a large server, like on Amazon? Or when you’ll start paying only for the data storage you’re using, and not for a bunch of empty disk that you had to buy for “future growth”, like on Amazon?
And that’s how to use the cloud without changing one piece of technology.
I like the web site the Terry Fox Foundation has put together for their annual school run to raise funds for cancer research. It lets people donate on-line, of course. Much more interesting is that it lets kids collect and create their own content – photos and videos – and post them on their own page, along with a graph showing how close to reaching their fund-raising goal they are.
My son Marc got right into making videos for it. For the Foundation, it gets kids thinking and talking about Terry Fox and the importance of cancer research. For the kids, it gets them producing content for the web. The future belongs to those who produce content. (Those of us who produce the technology will be like the guys today who keep the mainframes running.)
Shameless commercial: You can contribute to cancer research by supporting Marc’s run here.
A friend pointed me at this awesome blog post from Backblaze, who sell cloud storage: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog. They build their own storage boxes based on a commodity motherboard running Linux, and standard open source software.
| I filled the disk on my VMWare Server 2 host, which caused all sorts of grief. Part of the grief was that I couldn’t get to the management interface at https://vmhost:8333/ui. I solved that problem by killing the VMWare hostd process (after freeing up some space on the disk): | |
| <ol><li>Look up the process ID: ps -ea | grep hostd</li><li>Kill the process: sudo kill pid </li><li>Remove the old lock file: sudo rm /var/run/vmware/vmware-hostd.PID</li><li>Restart VMWare management: sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-mgmt restart </li></ol> |