I found this essay on Paul Graham’s website. Here is the link. I’ve quoted it for posterity.
One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.
There are two types of schedule, which I’ll call the manager’s schedule and the maker’s schedule. The manager’s schedule is for bosses. It’s embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you’re doing every hour.
When you use time that way, it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.
Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.
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http://infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/open-source-hive-large-scale-distributed-data-processing-made-easy-126?page=0,0
Looks neat. Someday I shall play with it.
Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn) has been end of life for sometime now. Unfortunately we didn’t do an upgrade at work prior to that time. Now that we are virtualizing the entire colo infrastructure, we can leverage vmware snapshots and our existing maintenance windows to perform the upgrades.
Ubuntu provides upgrade paths for the previous version to LTS and from previous LTS release to the current LTS release. Since 7.10 was in place between 7.04 and 8.04, there was now way to go from 7.04 using the existing repositories. Luckily the nice folks at Ubuntu provide http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
The procedure to do the upgrade is as follows:
Download the gutsy upgrade tarball from the gutsy repository on old-releases (http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz) and untar it into a temp directory.
cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.fiesty
sed s/archive.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g /etc/apt/sources.list > 1
sed s/security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g 1 > 2
sed s/fiesty/gutsy/g 2 > /etc/apt/sources.list
rm 1 2
mkdir /tmp/gutsyUG
cd /tmp/gutsyUG
wget -O /tmp/gutsy.tar.gz http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ../gutsy.tar.gz
You need to edit the prerequists-sources.list file to use old-releases and not us.archive. Replace the only uncommented line in that file with:
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-backports main/debian-installer
Now you can run the upgrade command:
./gutsy --frontend DistUpgradeViewText --mode=server
This will upgrade you from 7.04 to 7.10. Once you are running 7.10, you need to upgrade again to 8.04.
sed s/fiesty/hardy/g /etc/apt/sources.list.fiesty > /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
do-release-upgrade
All along the way it will prompt you if you want to keep your config files. I'd recommend keeping the defaults. Quite a bit changed from 7.04 to 8.04 in how ldap auth works. It will be interesting to see how my systems upgrade.
Note: This process has only been proofed in concept not rigiorusly tested in the field. Your mileage may vary.
Ubuntu has some community docs on EOL Upgrades here that may be useful.
So a few months ago I started thinking about virtualization and the future of my profession (System Administration). So much of the hassle we have involves software compatibility issues with libraries and the code that runs on it.
My thoughts were that is would be much easier if, instead of big OSes with lots of services running on it, we had a micro-distribution running just a single application. A DNS or Mail server could be shipped as a virtual appliance with some form of hooks for shared storage via NFS or MySQL for its configuration information.
Welp, the folks monitoring the chip in my head took that idea and created JeOS (pronounced Juice). Just Enough OS is the term for my micro-distribution. And trolling though Ubuntu’s site today I discovered they’ve got a JeOS version.
With the accelerated nature of the Virtualization Project I’ve got going at work I’m not gonna propose JeOS at this time. Heck, I’m not sure I’ll even have time to bring the P2V’ed servers up to the latest LTS release, much less split up services and migrate to a different edition. But I do plan to play with it some, and may propose it to IT for the radius server we’ll need to build.
Not sure if this is documented anywhere, my link for 3.5.x is incorrect in the procedure.
To enable SSHd on ESXi 4.0:
1) At the console Hit ALT-F1
2) type “unsupported” it will not be echoed back to you
3) you’ll see a passwd prompt. Enter the root passwd for that ESXi host.
4) vi /etc/inetd.conf
5) Uncomment the line begining with “ssh tcp”
6) ps ax | grep inetd
7) kill -1 $PID_from_step_6 
type exit to log out and ALT-F2 to go back to the ESXi admin screen
Tags: vmware esxi