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Sometimes I get lazy and decide I’d rather link to something than write.

I justify it because they’re kind of cool.

Rolling out a new piece of software, or a new policy, or a new and exciting piece of technology usually tends to wind up being something of a disaster.  Rarely are all the players working together to make for a smooth transition and the result is a debacle that usually falls in the lap of someone like me: the generic network admin.  As a front line for complaints and questions, the botched rollout leads to an endless source of long, tedious busy work, stressed phone calls, and general annoyance.

Recently I took the point on the rollout and I’m happy to say it  came together.  During the two to three weeks it took to get everything in place I jotted down a few notes, so the next time I do this I know ducks I need to line up before the product goes live.

1. Test the Product

In the past, half the issues that have arisen are due to unexpected behaviors, not on the part of the users, but from the software itself.  Not every single thing can be fixed, but making sure the people that will be supporting the new device are solid with its workings is vital.

2. Dodge the Creep

The first, biggest, and highest commandment with any rollout is minimizing the surface area for problems.  Roll out as little as possible while still retaining the core functionality.  Roll the product or software out to as few as possible, while making sure the key players are all included.  Don’t stretch too far, don’t turn a small task into a big one.

3. Prep the Field

Drop hints that changes are coming.  A prepared staff is better than an unprepared staff.  Even if the users in questions are pleased by the changes, they’ll appreciate the advanced knowledge.  This is especially true with the people in crux positions.  This obviously includes certain managers, but also the more charismatic employees and the individuals most likely to cause problems.

4. Get Everyone on Board

Sadly, this is never truly possible and it’s really just addendum to the note above, but it’s an important thing to attempt.  People on the top need to support the decision and people on the bottom need to be given the tools to accept it.  Receiving feedback prior to a final rollout, offering up training, and getting a few strong voices of supporting in the ranks before the rollout makes the whole process go a lot smoother.

5. Plan the Rollout

All the preparation in the world can dissolve into nothing if the last day becomes chaos.  The steps need to be outlined long before the final day.  An introductory email should be written and tested, a process for manually introducing the software should be in place, a response network to complaints and questions has to be ready for the first day.

6. Back it Up

The final thing and the most important for an extended project is holding the line.  There will almost always be complaints and they have to be dealt with, without compromising the original project.  A person prefers to use the old software-response: we’ll train you on the new software, but you still have to use it.  Allowing for loopholes and cracks turns into a support nightmare, undermines the new product, and makes a mess of the whole process.  A strong line has to be taken and held in order to have a successful rollout.

My rollout (of spiceworks and a few other things) have gone smoothly.  The best thing was dropping hints and giving small contained demonstrations long before I was ready to push the thing.  I showed a handful of people I knew would likely to either use the software or have some leverage over those who would or would simply be responsive.  In the end, when the big day came, the process was smooth and pretty damn well flawless.  Result: I get to sick back and let out a big sigh of relief.

Why even bother writing science fiction…

In my own novel I allow the protagonist and other citizens to provide passive scans.  These scans reveal names and other, mostly innocuous information, but colonists, basically super-citizens, are able to pull out more interesting information from the global database.  Similarly, these credentials allow access to different parts of the city, queue in to the transportation network with saved preferences, and reference all manner of banking and authentication services.

Luckily, in my world, these tools are used rather infrequently and their misuse, while possible, is considered relatively rare and insignificant.  I’m not so sure our own world is on such a benign track.   The rules regarding large corporate database’s are especially arcane.  How much information does Facebook actually have?  How easily can that be connected with other publicly accessible information?  Given the nearly endless supply of personal details that pass through the system, often without an individual’s knowledge, the potential for mischief is staggering.  It would be an interesting study to find out how completely a person who was not a member of Facebook or Myspace or another social networking service could be constructed through implied data.

Even more interesting is the possibilty of collisions or orphaned data.  Will two people appear merged in a database?  With a certain level of skill and luck, could a person construct an entire digital persona so completely that they, for all intents and purposes, actually exist?  In time could this profile, meticulously crafted for years, be translated into a real life identity?  Currently a person can’t apply for a driver’s license using a Myspace profile, but newscorp doesn’t own the DMV yet.  That’s maybe excessive…but I have to wonder how much.

Almost Monday, have a good week everyone!

Opera 10 was released last week!  I was using the beta so the release didn’t bring any surprises, but now that the new version is ready for primetime I can plug it to the masses.

Opera 10 is an ultra light full-featured web browser.  There are faster browsers out there and there are browsers with more plugin support, but as a simple, fast, secure web browser that’s fun to use and requires few tweaks, Opera is at the top of the game.

Linkity Link to the Download!

Opera is significantly faster than the notoriously bloated Internet Explorer, is less annoying with updates than Firefox, follows the CSS and HTML standards very closer, and comes with a handful of standard features the other browsers only have as plugins or outside additions.  Opera’s Dragonfly is a built in firebug.  Speed Dial is a standard feature with Chrome, but Opera has a better interface.  Opera has a built in torrent client, which isn’t standard fare on any major browser.  Opera also comes with a poorly named turbo mode that routes traffic through Opera’s servers.  They condense the data for better access on slow networks.  It’s not that big of a deal on a home network, but trapped on a slow public wireless connection that’s great.

The Opera 10.10 update is going to be really exciting.  They are building a small web server (called Opera Unite) into each browser that developers can take advantage of to make even more expansive and useful updates.  That update isn’t available yet, but now is a perfect time to get into Opera with the newest 10 release.

I’m a network administrator by day.  (Batman by night.)  Network Administration, like pretty much everything else, follows the 80-20 rule.  80% of the my daily tasks take 20% of my time.  20% of my tasks take up the rest.

Some things just take a long time.  Checking logs is and always will be a moderately time consuming task.  Sure, there are monitoring programs to keep an eye on each computer (and I use many of them, Nagios most of all), but I prefer to do it manually, just to keep myself honest.

Printers are only branch of tasks that inevitably take longer than they should.  Setting them up, fixing them, buying ink, adding new paper, giving users access.  Printers suck.  It’s a fact of life.

Until recently I assumed that managing inventory would fall on the same list.  It’s something that has to be done, but it always takes forever…always.

And, I lie.  I’ve started using Spiceworks at the office.  It’s a help desk ticket system / inventory list / network management / unified IT portal destination that takes all of thirty minutes to set up and works like a charm.  I don’t need to pass along the sales pitch, but here at my office, we’re using Spiceworks for two things: help desk ticketing and inventory.

Spiceworks runs a web browser with a web form that users can fill out.  A ticket is then generated and the relevant department workers are notified.  From here we can respond to the ticket at our leisure and the user can keep an eye on the item’s status through the web interface.  No more lost ‘my mouse is broke’ emails or long forgotten repair requests.  Best of all, I can run reports to see who is having the most issues, what tasks are reoccuring, and where the department needs to improve.

Inventory is performed using SSH for Mac/Linux computers and WMI for Windows machines.  Our network had some difficulty in getting all the windows machines to get recognized, primarily because we do not use windows domains.  Being unable to push policy to turn on WMI services, I was forced to travel to machines individually to get them working.  Mostly though it worked and the small tweaks involved didn’t take half as long as doing manual inventory.  With everything setup I can get computer names, ip addresses, model numbers, hard drive space, mac addresses, software versions, and dozens of other facts within seconds.  Inventory isn’t quite fire and forget, but it’s no longer drudge and drudgery.

I read Laser Space Communications as part of my Lonetracker research.  It’s pretty technical overall, at least for me, but it was an interesting read.  It seems to be fairly expensive to get a hold of so if someone is looking around for it I can lend it out.  *I wish I was better at physics.

Why Authors Have Websites or How I Grew To Love The Web

I happen to be rather lucky.  I’m trying to be an author and I’m already alright at web design.  (This web page is not exactly my best work, but it’ll be getting tweaked soon.)

Websites really are a necessary resource these days.  Authors in particular need a medium to communicate new projects to their audiance.  For authors that stay within certain genres maybe it’s less vital, but any author that has books in a few different sections of the bookstore needs some way of pointing their audiance where to work.

In the case of George RR Martin and Michael Stackpole (the two author’s whose sites I visit the most consistantly) they always have some note on what their doing, what conventions their going to, writing samples, outside projects etc etc.  As a fan it’s fun and informative and kinda cool.  For the author’s it’s building up a brand, just like every other product and service.

I’ve been using Twitter quite a bit.  It’s a rather stupid novelty sort of thing, but oddly addictive.  I log in every once in a while and see what everyone up to…140 characters at a time.

I’m not sure how you would go about restoring your twitter, but if the service ever lost the data you can back your twitter up with Tweetake.  It’s a neat little service that pumps out a CSV of all your twitter data…friends,posts, followers, even your profile image url.

I mentioned that week that I had read a book about terraforming worlds.

Very cool, very interesting, very inspiring.  I kind of want to start.    Let’s start raising the albedo of Mars.  Why can’t we get this ball rolling? Let’s do this.

It’s all very far in the future, of course and even having read the book I don’t trust myself to try to explain the process.  Instead…read the book!  It’s pretty great.

Also before I sign out: Time Dilation – Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity

Just something cool I found while doing a bit of research.

I recently setup A Centos 5.3 box to backup a handful of windows machines and a boat load of Freebsd servers. If someone finds this guide useful…great. If not, well tough. My disclaimer: I take no responsibility for what anyone manages to do with this guide.

I’m assuming the Centos box is all installed. I went with a clean install of Centos 5.3, using the basic Gui-less server packages. I named the box BACKUP. Also, I didn’t want rsnapshot running as root so it’s setup to work as the rsync user. I’m also installing webmin and samba for some remote access. Enjoy.

Add BACKUP to networks

setup
Go to Network Configuration
Add in static IP addresses
service network restart
This should set your box with the static address.

Set Time
date
Confirm date is correct. If not…
date nnddhhmmyyyy
Thats MonthDayHourMinuteYear

Add Rsync User
/usr/sbin/useradd rsync
passwd SomeGoodPassword

Add an Rsync user to every linux/unix computer that you’re going to be backing up.

Install Rsync on every Linux/Unix machine that you want to backup.
For FreeBSD Machines:
/usr/ports/net/rsync
Make install clean

Install RSnapshot
Centos:
Mkdir /download
Cd /download
wget http://www.rsnapshot.org/downloads/rsnapshot-1.3.0-1.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh rsnapshot-1.3.0-1.noarch.rpm

Create Password-less SSH Login for RSync User
Login as Rsync User
ssh-keygen -t rsa
default options no passphrase

To add a FreeBSD Machine:
scp /home/rsync/.ssh/id_rsa.pub rsync@remotehost.com:~/.ssh/authorized_keys
To A Centos Machine:
scp /home/rsync/.ssh/id_rsa.pub rsync@remotehost.com:~/.ssh/authorized_keys2

(If you get a permission error log into the remotehost and create the .ssh folder under the rsync user’s home directory.)

For adding windows machine allow me to direct you to this great cwrsync tutorial.

Using Rsnapshot to Backup Windows Machines

Change Permissions
chgrp rsync /var/log/rsnapshot
chown rsync /var/log/rsnapshot

mkdir /.snapshots/
chgrp rsync /.snapshots/
chown rsync /.snapshots/

mkdir /var/run/rsnapshot/
chgrp rsync /var/run/rsnapshot/
chown rsync /var/run/rsnapshot/

Change Rsnapshot.conf
I change the lockfile location to a folder that is owned by the rsync user so I don’t get permission issues when I run the command.

Nano rsnapshot.conf
Uncomment: cmd_rsync /usr/bin/rsync
Change:
Lockfile /var/run/rsnapshot.pid
To
Lockfile /var/run/rsnapshot/rsnapshot.pid

Add Rsnapshot Entries
Nano rsnapshot.conf

Examples Entires (note everything is tab spaced)

For interval

interval daily 7
interval weekly 4
interval monthly 3

#Example entry for a FreeBSD machine-this backs up the /home/all/ folder and puts it undr a machine.com folder when backed # up. Make sure the rsync user has access to that folder.
backup rsync@machine.com:/home/all/ machine.com

#Example entry for a windows machine
backup windows.machine.com::AShare windows.machine.com/Share

Add Cron
Nano /etc/cron.d/rsnapshot

50 23 * * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot daily
40 23 * * 6 /usr/bin/rsnapshot weekly
30 23 1 * * /usr/bin/rsnapshot monthly

This can also be tweaked in the web admin installed later.

Test Rsnapshot
Test by logging in as rsync user
Rsnapshot daily

Daily.0 should be created in the /.snapshot folder. It should have completely backed up all the desired folders.

Install Webmin
cd /download
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/webadmin/webmin-1.380-1.noarch.rpm rpm -i webmin-1.380-1.noarch.rpm

Add it to Centos Firewall
setup
Go to Firewall Configuration
Add port 10000
quit
service iptables restart

Login to Webmin

https://BackupMachine.com:10000

I want my freebsd machines to backup their databases so I can hopy them over.

Start Mysql Database Backups on Client Machines using Webmin.
In webmin
Server->Mysql->Backup
Set Backups to run automatically.

Configure for the /mysqlbackup folder.
chown rsync /mysqlbackup
chgrp rsync /mysqlbckup

Enable Samba
Enable Samba in Webmin
Edit smb.conf
Add Modules (This is pretty obvious. There are a thousand and one Samba tutorials)
Restart Samba Service

Add Users
Smbpasswd NameOfCurrentUser

Add that linux user rsync group

And done. With this you can backup every day (or whenever. Hourly?) databases, windows computer, normal files, and whatever else. You can monitor the server via webmin and check the backups through the samba share. However. Have fun!

Also: for more information. Try this guide.