A great tutorial for creating Chef cookbooks

System administrators who are looking for a tool that helps them automating their maintenance tasks and have no or only little experience with Chef should really take a look at Joshua Timberman's great tutorial "Guide to Writing Chef Cookbooks".

In his article, Joshua describes all steps he takes to create a new Chef cookbook that installs and maintains smartmontools (a set of tools to monitor hard disk health). It's a great example how straightforward it is to automate systems operations tasks with Chef.

Even with two years experience in using Chef, I learned one or two bits from this tutorial. And it just so happened this week that I needed a smartmontools cookbook. So, thanks twice for writing this up, Joshua!

Travel tips for sysadmins

OpenDNS recently added a datacenter location in Frankfurt, Germany. On their blog, George Patterson, Director of Operations for OpenDNS, not only posted some pictures of their server rack but also a bunch of tips for sysadmins that have to travel to a remote facility:

• Have a solid deployment checklist of everything you want at the site. If you don't bring all necessary tools and equipment with you, getting them will cost you extra time.
• Set up all your power at the datacenter and make sure it's working before you leave. Don't waste time waiting for the datacenter staff to have your power supply connected. And have them install a remote manageable power distribution unit, so you don't have to pay remote-hands charges.
• If you can avoid it, don’t book a flight until your gear has cleared customs. Depending on the country, customs handling can take from a few days to several weeks. Don't just hope that your gear will arrive earlier than you.
• Always plan for extra days. You shouldn't have to go into fast-forward mode because something took a bit longer than planned; that will only account for more problems. Plan for some extra days and if you'll finish early, there probably will be more to go and see than only a datacenter.
• Take photos along the way, and at the end. If your site documentation includes images, it's very easy to point a remote tech to the right place.

Read George's whole blog post on the OpenDNS blog!

Emacs and The Second Coming of TextMate

A text editor is one of the most important tools of a sysadmin, software developer, documentation and blog writer. So, after switching from Linux to Mac a few years ago, I immediately starting looking for a good editor software. On Linux, I had been using Emacs for many years, but its Mac versions available at that time didn't convince me. They rather reminded me of the reasons for which I replaced my desktop OS after all. It didn't take me long to find TextMate and it became one of the first in the long line of applications I purchased in my Mac life. And I've been using it daily ever since.

TextMate is a very capable editor and its add-on "bundle" concept makes it easily extendable. There are bundles for every common programming language, for using version control systems and even a bundle for blogging that lets you not only write and preview your writing but also publish your finished post.

But there is also one concern that's been bugging TextMate users for a long time now: the author is working on version 2 of the software. At least that's what he uses to claim on his blog every few months. Recently, Watts Martin must have lost his patience and in "Text Editor Intervention", he makes a compelling case that there are proven alternatives to eternally waiting for the Second Coming of TextMate:

But in the meantime, you gotta get work done. Either pony up money for BBEdit, pony up time for MacVim (or Emacs), or stick with TextMate.

Shorty after reading his thought-provoking post, I came upon Joshua Timberman's blog post "Switching to GNU Emacs". I did a short search and it almost looks like there is an Emacs renaissance going on.

As you may already have guessed, I decided to give it a try and join the movement. Why?

1. Back in the days, I've been using Emacs for almost everything that had to do with plain text. I know I'll be able to accomplish all the tasks for which I've been using TextMate.
2. GNU Emacs has been ported to Cocoa in the meantime, so its UI runs natively on Mac OS X.
3. After installing Emacs, I realized that all of the important Emacs keyboard shortcuts are still stored in my muscle memory.
4. Getting Emacs fit for a variety of tasks is easy with pre-configured packages like the Emacs Starter Kit.
5. The effort of customizing and extending probably is more effective if put into Emacs. As Watts puts it:

Why do I recommend three stodgy old warhorses? Well, any editor that has a still-growing community after two decades is probably doing something right.

And finally, as GNU Emacs is the embodiment of Free Software, I certainly won't have to pay another license fee for the next major version.

Repentantly, I return into the arms of the Church of Emacs.

The Barking Seal: Fun with date

Over at The Barking Seal, I found a nice demonstration what's possible with the date command: Fun with Date.

Especially, the handling of Epoch timestamps and relative dates is very useful.

Weeknote #49

Over the seas in all degrees

Markus left yesterday in direction of the Pacific south east. He’ll take a few days off. Until July, actually. Taking the opportunity to get away from the usual life is a great idea in my eyes and I wish him all the relaxation and inspiration he’s hoping for. I wonder, though, how long it will take until the urge to code on some ideas kicks in. I guess I’ll find out on Twitter or his vacation blog.

Private yes, but professional?

We’re a distributed company and not all of our work is done by the owners or employees. We also hire freelancers and last week, I gave delegating some work to a VPA a try. I contacted Strandschicht and they assigned me an assistant from Romania. He speaks good German, as Strandschicht requires for all their VPAs. I have to concede, though, that his first job left me only 80% satisfied. First, he promised to do the work on Friday but when I contacted him on Saturday, he apologized that he had to do another client’s job first. He then actually got to work on my assignment on Monday. Overall, he did well. Where he left a bit to desire was where he came back to me with questions that were already answered in my instruction email. And, most annoyingly, in three of the emails I had him write to our clients, he forgot to change the salutation. Big doo-doo. I consider people’s names very important and just can’t accept that three clients got greeted with “Dear Mr./Mrs. -“. I’ll still have to decide how to proceed from here. (Please, tell me in the comments how you would!)

Office space

I’m writing this weeknote in the “S-Office”, as I lovingly call the Starbucks in the Freiburg city centre where I spend a lot of time working (Mayor, of course!). Although I have a great workplace at home, I need a bit of variety from time to time. And when Amalias’s home all day (like yesterday, to recover from a cold), there’s not much working without disturbance any more. Unfortunately, Starbucks isn’t that quiet a place sometimes, either. Every now and then, there are days when all tables are taken and patrons are bustling in and out. Even my trusty Etymotics earphones can’t provide a complete shield against the flurry then. That’s why last week, I signed a contract with a company that rents office space on an hourly basis. All I have to do is to reserve a room in advance on the online calendar. Yesterday, I used the office for the first time and really, it’s great to have a quiet space to retreat to while at home, three kids are trashing the place while their mothers are having tea.

International business

When we started DrupalCONCEPT last year, we targeted our domestic market first. Now, business gets more and more international. And it’s not only our Drupal hosting clients that are distributed over the world, our IT infrastructure is increasingly, too. A growing number of clients demands minimal website response time regardless where in the world their visitors are coming from. The standard solution for this is a Content Delivery Network (CDN), a network of globally distributed servers that deliver content to the website visitors most nearby. Most CDNs work on static content only, but we need to deliver page content locally, too. That’s why we decided to build our own infrastructure: a network of caching servers all over the world. This week, for example, we’ll deploy a caching satellite in Brazil. It’s a great example for our main business objective: Delivering top-of-the-line IT solutions.

Weeknote #44

You’re feeling as if time crawls like syrup? Get sick while having a heap of work and watch time fly by! That what I did over Christmas. I got a head cold and couldn’t get any of the tasks done that I had planned to work on during the quieter days. It was really hard for me to accept that I would have to tell clients that we still weren’t ready for their projects after two weeks of downtime. But I also knew that forcing it would result in mediocre work and maybe me getting more seriously ill, so I kept my feet still and tried to recover as fast as possible. Of course, when I finally got back in business, many tasks had transitioned from “important” to “important and urgent”. That’s why January became a month of hustling. With the most pressing projects done now, we got back in control of our workload, so I’ve got time to write another weeknote.

Action days

An article on GigaOm describing the concept of an “action day” caught my immediate interest in December. Actions days foster results-oriented working, engagement and motivation in teams by an hourly exchange about achieved results and the next tasks about to get done. Our first try at an action day went so well that Markus stated “It almost feels like we sit in an office together”. So we decided to have an action day every Wednesday.

By the way, we didn’t use a teleconferencing solution to report our results, but instead a feed created especially for this on our company site on Yammer.

Social days

Like last year, visiting conferences and, ideally, giving talks there will be one of our most important marketing efforts this year, too. In Open Source services, nothing beats personal contact and the opportunity to prove one’s competence and answer important client questions at the same time.

Friday, Markus and I will be on trains to Brussels for the Drupal Developer Days where I will give a talk about “Developer-friendly Drupal hosting”. In this talk, I’ll try to explain how DrupalCONCEPT differentiates itself from the many hosting services on the market. We’re also a Silver sponsor of the weekend. (Probably the only one not appearing on the print materials because we couldn’t procure a vector version of our logo…)

I also happily accepted the invitation to give a talk about systems automation with Chef at the Open Source Datacenter Conference in April. All of our servers (of which we got more than 40 already) are maintained from a central Chef instance which lets us reduce the time spent for repeating system administration tasks to a minimum. Without such a system, I would do system administration all day and wouldn’t have time for any of my business tasks.

Since I’m going to do some traveling this year, I really appreciate how TripIt makes it easy for me to put together a travel itinerary. I just forward my DB Online Ticket to them and they create a nice overview with all train connections and reservation information. Then I add my hotel reservation and find everything I need in one place, which is the TripIt app on my iPhone. Very handy!

Vacation days

Markus is going to go on a big trip from March to July. In February, he’ll finish his running projects so there should be no loose ends when he’s off. While he’s hopping from beach to beach, I’ll keep the stations manned, dreaming about where I’ll disappear to after he comes back.

Two very different acquisition notices I received today

Dimdim:

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com. Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!

Pursuant to the Dimdim Terms of Use (the “Agreement”) governing the use of Dimdim Inc.’s (“Dimdim”) Site and Services (as defined under the Agreement) by you (“You”), Dimdim is hereby exercising its right to terminate Your Dimdim Account and the Agreement in its entirety. Dimdim will continue to provide Services to you until March 15, 2011. Following March 15, 2011, neither You nor Dimdim shall have any further rights or obligations of any kind under the Agreement, including the right to access the Site, or receive or use any Services. Dimdim thanks you for your business, and wishes you success in the future.

Socialite:

That notice above makes me glad I never used Dimdim for serious work. The other one makes me reconsider giving Socialite another try.