KACE systems management - commercial alternative to cfengine and puppet
Just learned about this line of commercial systems management appliances (company is named KACE) in a LOPSA forum:
Has anyone heard about or worked with/tested these products?
Lack of backup shuts company down
For those who haven’t heard about Journalspace.com going the way of the dodo:
hothardware.com/News/Sabotage-and-Lack-of-Data-Backup-Sink-Company/
Lessons from this incident abound:
- Choosing a sysadmin (what kind of sysadmin thinks that RAID = backup???)
- Managing IT
- Dealing with fired employees that have the keys to the kingdom
Vacations that are not
Today I was mostly left alone. Gotta love vacation. No progress on the rework of my computers, but I guess that’s what happens when you get caught up in the last throes of a dying year.
Now I have to figure out how to take a day off the first week back :)
On the plus side, I should be left alone for the rest of this day and tomorrow at least. If I’m really lucky, I can rework my firewall tomorrow and maybe get a few machines racked and rebuilt. I’m going to have to take pictures of the racks. I suppose I should get a bigger UPS power supply installed as well. I need to find (or build) a rack-mount DSL modem as well. That could be an interesting project.
December Meeting
I know, the meeting is long past. I did want to say that we did in fact have a meeting and that we were having a social meeting.
Dinner at Ceylonta 19:00 to 21:00 bring a guest.
IT is not a place to cut your budget.
It’s amusing in a way. For years I’ve been sounding off on how any well run IT shop is not a profit center for a company. It doesn’t have to be a major drain on the resources, but IT is not a place to make money unless you sell IT services, but then your own IT is still a cost center.
A good IT shop will reduce your cost of doing business, but it does take investment in the function. You can only get by for so long on ancient equipment and used parts. The infrastructure has to be refreshed occasionally or you run the risk of having something critical fail and not only is it no longer made, the parts do not even exist any more. If you have a critical service or provide one to an external customer, you should be providing some level of high availability. The ten year old server in the corner that has been serving email without complaint is eventually going to blow a disk if not something else. It happens.