What was it that I did, you ask? Well let me tell you all of the tasks I was able to complete.

System Administration Study Group

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a way to do a regular free study group for those who want to improve their system administration skills, get certified, or just brush up on something they didn’t quite understand.

Enter sysadminSG, a self-guided tour of many of the standard tasks any system administrator should know. The main goal was to create an instance of a Fedora 14 machine for studiers to use.

Some of the tasks on the study sheets indicate certain issues that would need to be resolved which can’t be resolved without a ‘master’ instance. I was able to recruit a couple of excellent individuals to help get this further than I thought it would. Jon Stanley and Ivan Makfinsky helped put together many of the pieces which will help studiers get more done. Specifically, an ldap server for centralized authentication and iscsi target luns for use with LUKS encryption, LVM and disk partitioning.

Fedora Infrastructure

I attended the Fedora Infrastructure session, where we covered two major things of concern. One was removing the puppet staging branch and moving everything into ‘Production’. This is a mental shift for many, but makes sense because in truth, everything maintained from an infrastructure perspective is production.

Additionally, a longer term plan of being able to spin up ‘staging’ environments for any new things that will go into production looks to be the direction we’ll be going. Many of the applications we have in Fedora require some work to get us to this point, mostly so they can be more atomic pieces. I think a proof of concept environment will provide us with an good idea of how much work will be involved.

pam_otp

After the Fedora Infrastructure hackfest, there was a two-factor authentication hackfest. We discussed using Yubikeys and a unique PIN together for authentication within Fedora. The initial goal was determined to setup sudo authentication for sysadmin-main group with two-factor authentication.

Nathaniel McCallum found the pam_otp library and was able to get it to compile. He passed it on to me to test and document it, which I was able to get working after a drunk night by the fire. I was then able to document the usage of it and have a test rpm that we’ll be using.

All in all, it was a very productive weekend and more work will be getting done over the next few weeks as well. It’s all very exciting and fun, a really good reason for attending FUDCon!

Cheers,

Herlo

It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster ride, and so far, being an independent consultant has been very fruitful for me.  Until mid-January, I was as busy as I ever wanted, sometimes too busy.  But time and time again, I’ve been reminded that there will be leaner times for me and Purple Atom, my new training and consulting start-up.

So far, it’s just me and a couple contractors who I have known for some time that I have used for a couple small jobs.  But it seems the work has slowed for now.  While I know it will be back in a month or so, I’ve been trying to land more work, that’s a bit like chasing one’s own tail.

As I grow my business, I’ve wanted to keep a steady income and be able to do the gigs I’ve wanted to do.  Mind you, I’m in no world of hurt monetarily, it’s just interesting to see my first real lull.  While I have a couple on-going contracts, I’ve not had any training gigs in almost a month.  And I have to say, it is nice and disconcerting at the same time.

I find myself doing a little each day to locate a new client, but most of my day is spent on projects I’ve previously ignored.  This is a good thing for my skillset and for the Fedora Project, since that’s where most of the work is going each day.  I’m the one giving me work, and I’m the one completing the work I’ve given myself.

It has been fun and useful

In late January, Jennifer and I took our little AJ to Tempe, Arizona.  I was heading there for the annual FUDCon conference, and Jennifer took AJ over to meet her extended family.  We spent eight (8) days travelling.  We travelled for two days, visited the Grand Canyon along the way.  Spent four (4) days in Tempe visiting family and attending FUDCon.  Our return over two days took us by the Hoover Dam and we stayed a night at the Luxor in Las Vegas.

When we returned, I’ve started to get into a routine of heading over to the coffee shop and working on one project or another.  Much of my time has been spent on personal projects.  I’m working on my own development project, PyCamps.  I’ve also worked on fpaste-server and the SCaLE FAD.

I also spent basically a whole day sorting out honeymoon plans.  Yes, that’s right, I’m getting married to Jennifer on May 13, 2011.  I’m really only in charge of paying for things, but since I’m in charge, we’re doing a real honeymoon too!

The future

Purple Atom is going well, but I want it to get to the vision I have for it.  I have some good partnerships for training and I love that part of my business.  The consulting part, however, I’d like to pare down and focus on helping small-to-medium sized companies build a better infrastructure.  There is much, much more to come about this, so if it interests you, stay tuned…

I know that in the next month, business will pick up with or without my pursuing other work. I’d like to think that I have the chops for this Entrepreneur thing, so I’m out looking for work.  If you know of anyone who is looking for a super-awesome-system-admin or needs help building or retooling an infrastructure, please contact me, leave me a comment, etc.

Cheers,

Herlo

We have a great presentation lined up for you all!  Here’s the details:

Infrastructure Renaissance

Open source is at the forefront of an evolving ecosystem of tools and processes for building more adaptable and maintainable computational infrastructure. Virtualization and network booting tools speed up and simplify the process of provisioning. Configuration management tools provide policy based service descriptions which collapse the complexity of scaling. Monitoring solutions provide feedback which potentially drive provisioning and configuration. For organizations to fully leverage these tools is often as much a social engineering problem as a technical one. This talk is about building computational infrastructure with the tools, and processes that can help maximize the benefits.

About Andrew

Andrew Shafer is a Co-founder of Reductive Labs Inc., helping organizations build more flexible and scalable systems through better tools and processes with the Open Source system management framework, Puppet™. He brings with him a background in computational science, embedded Linux development, web frameworks and Agile methods.  Currently, Andrew is devoted to AR⊗TA (arxta.net, watch the video). Andrew has been an Open Source user and advocate since the late 90s. His two sons think he is pretty cool.

See you all this Wednesday.

Cheers,

Herlo