Making things complex

System complexity has little to do with the nuts and bolts of an application.
Take for instance the use of the modern car. You can literally have a start/stop button, the steering wheel and the gas and brake pedals and no other control is necessary to rum the car. Gear changing, lights, wipers are all automatic in higher end cars.
So the fact there maybe 10th individual software apps underneath mean nothing to most administrators of a system. If it has a simple operation and a sensible setup then the system is not complex.
Which brings me to my second point. The last thing you need to care about with a system is wondering if you are on the right one.  A half broken system is worse than a broken one. Trying to work around "features" is so annoying I would rather not use it at all. Even worse is working around self induced issues.
Maintain what you have more than work on new systems you have, and stand on your principles if those that be tell you to do otherwise.
And thus ends today's lesson

New job again

I must be an ill contented person. I have changed jobs many many times. Is it so hard to expect to find a decent workplace these days. It is not as if I am looking for am increasing wage, I have often moved for less.
Some respect, a comfortable working environment (I.e somewhere they can keep toilet roll in stock), and a job that you actually get to do and some acknowledgment of a good job.
Now I am not talking constant reminders of what good little engineers we are, but when we pull it out the bag at the last minute, a "thank you" would be nice.
The previous place I was at, we were finally offered to be taken out as a thank-you for a real big ask of our skills. Two months later I left. No meal. Apparently still no meal talking to those left behind.

So the lesson is think of your minions, they give what you put in.

More updates to come, I commute on public transport so more time to blog.

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Planning ahead

Communication systems underlay our entire society and economy. Businesses rely on them to function, the loss of email can be more catastrophic than the loss of the telephone system or even a shop.

So as providers of communications, things need to work. They need to be understood, and provide rock solid services.

As such changes, new products, and management requires planning and time. It is not the sort of thing you hash in at the last minute. I believe most customers would prefer a stable working, well supported and understood product.

How frustrating is it when you buy a service and it either doesn't do what it says (or actually not quite in yet but in the pipeline) or stops doing what it did, and then you have to wait for a seemingly uncaring support team to fix the issue.

In defence of the support team, there is probably nothing they can do, it has possibly been passed onto an overworked engineering team, or another third party.

So think again when you design a solution. Is it ready for release, do you understand what is actually wanted. Do not release something before it is ready. Ensure it is supportable.

Pot calling kettle

I know how some people view Google, and I agree they have a lot of dominance in the market at the moment. But I was somewhat gob smacked by the quote in the news today, concerning the Microsoft owned company ciao.co.uk suing Google


"Parent company, Microsoft, claims that Google has used its dominant position to limit rivals' products."


Not like Microsoft has ever done anything like this.


I can't decide whether this is due to Microsoft's fear of Google, or their complete lack of any morales in search of the almighty dollar/pound/yen/etc

Someone having a rant, other than me

I work in a building that USED to be the local cemetery's chapel of rest. The keywords being "used to". There is a sign on the entrance saying the company name and also saying there is access to the CEMETERY.
The fact that the crematorium is next door (also sign posted), and accessed by a different entrance, is not our fault. We regularly get a few confused and slightly upset visitors.
But today we had a first. An irate mourner complaining to US that the crematorium is not well enough sign posted and it's not good enough (slamming the door on the way out).
Everyone has always been courteous, understanding the that person is possibly a little upset already. However, this slightly angered us and in some way amused us.

The main moral of this is one of general civility. Using abusive and threatening speech to someone who is unrelated to the issue you are complaining about is hardly going to endear them to helping you. If we had not already told them where to find the crematorium I would have given her false directions.

Woe is me

Upgrading with yum

To upgrade with yum

1	Login to the op5 Monitor server via ssh as the root user.

2	Check what packages that is pending for upgrade by execute: yum check-update

3	If you want to apply the upgraded packages execute: yum update

These are instructions from a commercial product we have. They provide repositories for the software to provide easier upgrade.

As a note this is definitely not the way to do it. This will update your entire system. I queried how to do this, and they effectively didn't know. The only method they have is to install the new version over the top. Wicked.

Commercial vs Opensource Contd...

My fight with the commercialised Nagios continues.

Though they've managed to fix a number of bugs, they seem quite capable of introducing more. Documentation is still poor (one of the support techs actually having to write an upgrade guide for me specifically).

In addition they have committed a most foul heinous crime: changing the architecture mid version.

version x.2 to x.3 totally changes the distribution/load balancing model. In fact in x.2 there was no such thing as load-balancing. beforehand. To me this is a major change in the system, and requires work to accommodate, and should only be done as a new version.

I can see how this is happening, RAD + opensource mentality means, fix the bugs add new features, release it into the wild. Not really what I would expect from a commercial product though. I need stability and bug fixes. New features are great, but I'd prefer to take those as a separate option