{"id":62,"date":"2008-04-22T06:57:15","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T11:57:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cae.tntech.edu\/mwr\/2008\/04\/22\/giving-a-presentation-at-the-tennessee-higher-education-it-symposium\/"},"modified":"2024-10-27T14:26:19","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T14:26:19","slug":"giving-a-presentation-at-the-tennessee-higher-education-it-symposium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/2008\/04\/22\/giving-a-presentation-at-the-tennessee-higher-education-it-symposium\/","title":{"rendered":"Giving a Presentation at the Tennessee Higher Education IT Symposium"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m heading to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tntech.edu\/itsymposium\/\">IT Symposium<\/a> this morning to give a talk on creating a managed Unix infrastructure from scratch, somewhat of a summary of several things I&#8217;ve posted here over the last year or so. Thanks to the folks on #puppet who read over them and gave editing suggestions.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/111\/2008\/04\/unix_infrastructure_management_from_scratch_slides.pdf' title='Slides for presentation'>Slides for presentation<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href='http:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/111\/2008\/04\/unix_infrastructure_management_from_scratch_handouts.pdf' title='Handouts for presentation'>Handouts for presentation<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> So yesterday, I get an email regarding my presentation (well, the slides, at least). No reason to clutter up the main page with it though, so if you&#8217;re not happy with the slides and want to express your displeasure, read the rest after the jump and see if I&#8217;ve addressed your concerns already.<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nHi Mike,<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve visited your site before and found your Debian preseeding info to be useful.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I just went through your presentation slides and must say I&#8217;m very disappointed.  It contains numerous examples of what gives sysadmins a bad name.  Egotistical, &#8220;I&#8217;m right, you&#8217;re stupid&#8221;, &#8220;I did this because I&#8217;m way too busy doing more important things than you&#8221;, etc. comments abound.<\/p>\n<p>On several occasions your first bullet-point was &#8220;just do it&#8221;, or &#8220;you need this&#8221;.  Hey Mike, people don&#8217;t come to conferences and presentations to listen to a smart-ass.<\/p>\n<p>You mentioned that the people in #puppet gave you useful feedback.  Next time you give a presentation, also get feedback from non-geeks.  They&#8217;ll help you filter out the cruft that makes you look like a spoiled 5-year old talking about his new widget set at show-and-tell.<\/p>\n<p>I hope for the sake of the attendees that your verbal presentation was better than your slideshow.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>To respond to the comments more or less in order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Sorry you didn&#8217;t like my slides. At first, I thought you were an irritated audience member who waited a couple of weeks before emailing me. But since you&#8217;re apparently only judging this based off the slides, that&#8217;s different.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I&#8217;m right, you&#8217;re stupid&#8221; is in the eye of the reader. Though you can&#8217;t tell without the soundtrack, it tended to work out more like &#8220;I used to do things one way, which probably is the most common way everyone else does it. It didn&#8217;t scale for the following reasons, and here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m doing instead.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I did it this way because I&#8217;m way too busy doing more important things than you&#8221; is a bit of an exaggerated inference. Am I busy? Sure. Am I busy doing things that most sysadmins don&#8217;t have to deal with? As far as I can tell, yes; most of the sysadmins in my immediate vicinity (and from past experience over the last 15-20 years) don&#8217;t have major duties outside systems administration, just like most of the engineers don&#8217;t have major duties outside their specialty or lab. These non-sysadmin tasks aren&#8217;t necessarily more important <em>per se<\/em>, but they&#8217;re important in my particular job description. The hours these other tasks take up in my week force me to find more efficient methods to do the systems administration tasks; others will possibly hit the same walls I have at different times &#8212; maybe when they have to keep track of 300 servers in 10 different roles, where all servers in a particular role have to be interchangeable. Maybe when they get a 1000 node cluster where a particular application has to be installed identically on every node, and on every node to be purchased in the future. My belief is that as time goes on, we&#8217;re all going to be managing more systems, not fewer, and that methods we use for managing a few systems relatively well don&#8217;t scale to larger groups of computers.<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Just do it&#8221; or &#8220;You need this&#8221; shows up in three places: using version control, using NTP for time synchronization, and using SMTP for email. I stand by each of those points, being entirely convinced by the verbiage at <a href=\"http:\/\/infrastructures.org\/\">infrastructures.org<\/a> that was my primary source material. I cannot fathom why someone would use something other than SMTP for sending email, why they wouldn&#8217;t want version control of some form as the code that automates their systems administration tasks grows more complicated, or why they&#8217;d use a different protocol to synchronize their system clocks. To me, each of those is as self-evident as &#8220;your SAN should have redundant power supplies&#8221; and &#8220;racks are a good way to house a bunch of servers in a small space&#8221;. You may have counterexamples, but since you didn&#8217;t provide any, I&#8217;m left in the dark.<\/li>\n<li>The folks on #puppet did give me some useful feedback. As for other feedback, I did ask a coworker to look at the slides, and he saw no problems with them. However, he&#8217;s a full-time Windows systems administrator, so his opinion may be suspect. As for non-geeks, they&#8217;re really not the intended audience, were generally absent from the conference, and aren&#8217;t too likely to be interested in systems administration techniques.<\/li>\n<li>Cruft in the verbal presentation? Guilty, but some might call it illustrative anecdotes. Personally, I&#8217;ve always tried to work in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencecartoonsplus.com\/\">Sidney Harris<\/a>&#8216; &#8220;I think you should be more explicit here in step two&#8221; joke into at least one over-equationed lecture per semester. The students seem to enjoy it:<br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/111\/2008\/05\/math07.gif' alt='I think you should be more explicit here in step two' \/><br \/>\nCruft in the slides? Matter of opinion, I guess. I did run out of time, but I honestly hadn&#8217;t done enough practice runs to see how long it would actually take.<\/li>\n<li>As for the spoiled five-year-old showing off his new widget set at show-and-tell, I have trouble understanding the issue. Lots of the talks at these conferences are basically a show-and-tell: other talks included &#8220;Software Deployment Using Ghost&#8221;, &#8220;Virtualizing Business Continuity &#8212; Getting Your Systems Back Online,&#8221; &#8220;DBA Task Automation II: Extending the Basics, Best Practices, Processes and Icing,&#8221; etc. When I submit an abstract saying that I&#8217;m going to give a talk about what goes into a &#8220;managed infrastructure,&#8221; its benefits over regular administration methods, and talk about a particular tool we use to accomplish some of these tasks, exactly what do I change in material? What do I change in delivery (that you didn&#8217;t see)? You&#8217;ve never told coworkers &#8220;holy crap, this Linux thing is awesome! It&#8217;s like Unix, but free and runs on regular PCs!&#8221; or similar? Nothing about using PHP to format stuff out of a database for some dynamic web pages? Nothing about a CMS or blogging platform that lets you do all the things a CMS or blog is supposed to do? Nothing about rrdtool, Nagios, cacti, apt-get, Perl\/Python\/Ruby or some other tool that you didn&#8217;t write, but by gosh it&#8217;s going to make all of your lives easier?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m heading to the IT Symposium this morning to give a talk on creating a managed Unix infrastructure from scratch, somewhat of a summary of several things I&#8217;ve posted here over the last year or so. Thanks to the folks on #puppet who read over them and gave editing suggestions. Slides for presentation Handouts for &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/2008\/04\/22\/giving-a-presentation-at-the-tennessee-higher-education-it-symposium\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Giving a Presentation at the Tennessee Higher Education IT Symposium&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,10,16,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-62","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debian","category-infrastructures","category-linuxunix","category-puppet","category-solaris","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":470,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62\/revisions\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.tntech.edu\/renfro\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}