Pythian Group

pipes, daemons, just another typical sysadmin day, really

This Thursday, I’ll be presenting at the Ottawa Valley SAGE meeting. The topic of the talk will be Perl for Sysadmins, and I’ll try to sell to the audience how Perl can make their lives much, much easier.

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Why Python?

- Low WTF per minute factor
- Passes the 6-month test (if you write python code, going back in 6 months, you pretty much know what you were trying to do)
- Small Shift/no-Shift ratio (ie, you use the “Shift” key a lot in Perl because you use $ % ( ) { } etc, so you can tell what something is by context, not by $ or %)
- It’s hard to make a mess
- Objects if you need them, ignore them if you don’t.

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The Beacon Pattern:
- This is a “Get out of the business” pattern
- Identify an oft-occurring and annoying task
- Automate and document it to the point of being able to hand it off to someone far less technical

Example:
- System admins were being put in charge of scheduling rooms in the building
- They wrote a PHP web application to help them automate the task
- They refined the app, documented how to use it, and handed it off to a secretary
- They have to maintain the app, but it’s far less work.

The Community Pattern:
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Considering my recent update to Ubuntu 9.10, I decided to have another go at getting TOra up and running. This time I am tackling a 64-bit system rather than the 32-bit “Hardy Heron” I had done previously.

On my way, I found some odd issues that I will describe here. All in all, it was a good few hours of cobbling together the pieces I needed to proudly present to you . . .

Installing TOra with Oracle support on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

Conventions and Caveats

• I use sudo for everything because logging in to root shells is just bad practice.
• I plug vi whenever possible, because vi is the greatest (and to annoy emacs people).
• I did this all in a KDE desktop, which means that some things I say may sound like I use KDE. Commands issued are in pre-formatted text without any prompt gunk in front of them, so cut and paste to your heart’s content.
• Output is also in pre-formatted text and I use it sparingly where relevant. Apt likes to output lots of text. I think it’s lonely.
• Some instructions are pasted from the original so you will not need to refer to my last howto to get this working. For an all-new jocular experience, no attempts at humour were recycled.
• When I say “dep”, I actually mean dependancy.

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