Posts by Trevor_Pott

Why not write up a...

The answer is simple: I haven't had to do them yet in the real world. I have been asked by a client to move Exchange --> Office 365. I spent a lot of time doing the research and writing up an internal document, it seemed like a quick-and-easy way to get a pair of sysadmin blog articles out with only some minor rewriting. Preferably sysadmin blog articles that might mean something to a reasonable chunk of my potential readers.

If and when I run across the need to document more things, I am sure they will find their way into these pages as well. (You can always go to http://www.egeek.ca and hire out my company to do whatever project you want. I am certain that if I have to do enough research/generate enough documentation to do that project, at least some aspect of it will end up rewritten in blog format here. Or, you know...ask me if I am willing to write an article on a given topic...)

In the meantime, you might like some of my previous articles:

SpamAssassin front-ending exchange: http://www.trevorpott.com/?p=275

Basic Linux bandwidth shaping: http://www.trevorpott.com/?p=308

I am working on documenting some of the tools I use with Google Apps (migration, maintenance, overcoming some of the missing features like shared contacts, etc.) I am sure that will eventually be at least one article.

Regarding the specific products you mentioned...the simple truth of the matter is that I haven't done a Zimbra migration in about 3 years. (I've done several "from scratches", but no migrations.) I haven't touched Scalix or Sogo in forever. I've never moved Exchange --> Postfix, though I probably set up a Postfix or Qmail server every week. (Virtualmin!)

As a general rule, I write an article when:

I have to do something new adn this creates documentation

I found something actually took some effort

Something interests me that I feel would interest my readers

As to being a shill...

There are only two vendors who have ever sent me demo gear to play with. Pano Logic and Intel. I’ve been a Pano fan for ages, so I never turn down the opportunity to play with their latest stuff. (I do have to send that back when I’m done.)

Intel once managed to get me a few 10GBe cards. This was in part so that I could do some tests for an article, but had much more to do with my attempts at the time to woo a customer looking at a 5000-node render farm deployment towards Intel’s gear and away from Brocade. (I was demoing Intel’s cards actually doing offload and not failing.)

In every other case, I have either had to buy the equipment myself, or (in some cases literally) beg local sysadmins for the chance to work with equipment they have on hand.

If you have a personal bias against Microsoft, fine. Have fun with that. But please don’t assume I am shilling for them. I abhor all megacorporates equally. With the sole exception of Intel – who once gave some previous-generation network cards to one of the marketing companies they retain to deal with resellers and the press, who in turn gave them to me – what have any of these companies ever done for me? (And frankly, I feel that is more on the PR company involved than Intel proper.)

I’m an SME sysadmin, man! I – and my entire customer base – don’t even exist to these companies!

Yes, The Register exists because of advertising dollars. Yes, some of those dollars do pay for my sysadmin blog. But my sysadmin blog receives zero direction as to content. Zip, zilch, zero. If it says “sysadmin blog” on the article, or it is in the sysadmin blog section…it is 100% the product of me, my two purring kitties (who insist on putting some the characters into the article by walking on the keyboard), the number 42 and the almighty coffee.

If you want me to write an article about a given topic…ask. I am not Dell or Microsoft. I am not some faceless megacorporate or untouchable journo who never engages with the readers. I’m just a guy, you know? I fix computers, I troll people on the internet and I write things on a blog.

If I have time to do the research, you’ll find I am usually willing to give it a try. I can’t guarantee that I’ll get around to it, but that’s only because I don’t have a “permanent” writing gig here on The Register. I get approximately one article a week, and I don’t know how many I have left.

If that still makes me a shill writing "advertisements", well…you’re even more paranoid than I am.

Re: Media companies

So use IPv6 NAT? Everyone else seems to be...

Re: Was anyone else...

Just hoping I win some replacement gear during some of those "attend out online training webinar and enter $impossibly_large_pool_of_other_nerds for a chance to win a new $midrange_item!"

In the meantime, I have 4 pano logic zero clients to test. They seem to like me and sent me demo gear of their latest widgetry. Should keep me occupied for a month or so. After that? Maybe I'll write more about Android. I have rather a lot of Android gear.

Change it up, I say. Write about new thing as they cross your desk. :)

Re: Elop did the correct thing..

He put all of Nokia's resources into backing a single (completely unknown) horse. That was beyond stupid. It was criminally negligent.

Meego could have been anything Nokia wanted. They simply had to work at it. Worth the R&D to own that chunk of the stack as a long-run item.

Android was (and is) a competitive market, but at least there is a market. It's the short term solid bet, even if it makes no practicable sense to sit on it long term. With Symbian to cover the featurephone range, it would have made a good source of income to fund corporate transition to something else.

WP7 is a reasonable medium term gamble, but certainly should not have been an “all in” choice. Everything about it is unknown. There is no market for it. Worse, the vendor guarding the operating system development has a terrible reputation of medium (to say nothing of long!) term consistency for developers, end users or “partners.”

Microsoft may “plays for sure” you, or “.NET, no Silverlight, no HTML5, no WinRT no…” you at any time. They have planet-wide enmity creating a highly disgruntled user base. They also completely fail at marketing. Utterly. Pants-on-head retarded. They do not comprehend the consumer market at all.

Taken together then, that’s a huge bloody risk. Despite all that, Windows Phone might still be worth it, depending on the back-room deals that get made, and the commitments Microsoft is willing to make to platform stability, etc.

I’m trying hard not to look at this from the standpoint of hindsight, honestly I am. But even when you consider “the information available to Elop at the time he made the decision,” he made a ridiculously stupid decision. It wasn’t just “he chose Microsoft and Microsoft are bad, herp, derp.”

The issue at hand is that “he bet the farm on a dark horse contender with a marginal reputation in an incredibly volatile, unpredictable and rapidly evolving market.” No backups of any kind.

Maybe it’s because I’m a sysadmin, but when I make decisions about my company with my CEO hat on, the first question to mind is “and what if that fails?” In an Elop world, the answer is “well then, we’re ****ed.”

Considering that numerous alternatives existed which could have formed the basis of adequate layered contingency plans, I don’t feel that I am going out on a limb here by saying “that’s just bad business.”

Re: Felicia Day

It's interesting to me to see your prejudices showing through in your comments.

Obviously if a male respects a female, he must "have an enormous crush on her," right? There's no other possible reason. Personally, I think she's cute; but frankly, not that cute. There's no reason to go ga-ga over Felicia Day because of sheer looks; Hollywood provides us dozens of tarted up this-or-that that are far more to my personal taste, even several who play geeks on TV.

Secondly, I didn't yammer on about her playing scientists on TV. That's a day job, as far as I am concerned, and something that you have chosen to focus on. It’s frankly the element of her professional and hobbiest life I find least interesting. (Honestly, I’m far more interested in her musicianship and writing.)

But whether or not you choose to admit it, people do avoid ICT and STEM jobs because of the “geek” stigma. They don’t want to be around geeks. They don’t want to BECOME geeks. Whether or not ICT and STEM fields are in fact populated by geeks (and to what actual percentage) is irrelevant. perceptions of such is huge.

So there are important classes of people in my mind that we need to get out in front of those who would be turned off by working next to raging geeks. The first are individuals like Felicia Day who is in fact a gigantic geek…but also pulls that off as “okay.” She’s not an introvert, she’s not shunned, she’s not the kind of person you chain to a desk and throw snickers bars at over the roof while yelling “keep working.”

She’s popular. She’s respected. She’s even fawned over by a reasonable chunk of 20-somethings. The concept that geeks aren’t scary – and can in fact be awesome – is important for the short term. Because in the short term, there is still a significant chunk of the population that cannot separate “raging geek” from ICT or STEM. So we need to make “being a geek” okay.

The next sort of person that is important to get out there are ICT/STEM workers who have nothing to do with geekdom at all. Gearheads, outdoors types, gardeners, writers, you-name it. Demonstrate a diversity within the field that shows a lack of cultural monoculture.

Unlike you however, I see that both are absolutely necessary. I understand the engineer’s approach of “picture only the best possible scenario and work towards that,” but we aren’t’ dealing with machines. We’re dealing with people. Group dynamics on a scale of hundreds of millions. That means planning for transitionary events, and spending more time planning on how to get from “extant to perfect” as it does trying to design the perfect solution itself.

It may well be that we will never separate ICT/STEM from the geek mystique, so we need people like Felicia Day to make geekiness seem “okay.” At the same time, we need to strongly encourage non-geeks so that all these related fields experience a diversity of experience, opinion and viewpoint.

So Felicia Day is a good role model in my mind. She is one of two necessary types. One that demonstrates that “geek can be cool.” Not just fake geeks “as seen on TV,” but she’s a real geek, in real life, with real geekly skills and qualifications. Even if you yourself don’t aspire to geekdom, it’s a wonderful thing to have this person out there showing geeks aren’t to be feared.

But this conversation has a much darker side. Certainly there are commenters in this thread who can’t help by try to define ICT/STEM according to their own beliefs. You yourself are guilty: constantly equating ICT with “programming,” to the apparent exclusion of all the other skillsets involved in ICT.

Others push engineering, some will push maths…but the point is that it is all absolutist thinking. Rigid, inflexible. “This is what it means to be X” is just one more way of saying those who want to enter the field must rigidly conform to something.

The correct approach is to take each and every individual on their own merits, and see what they bring to the table. There’s a hell of a lot more to ICT and STEM than programming, or engineering, than maths or any other one skill/belief/cultural element you can name.

So I do not proclaim Felicia Day as “the one true role model for aspiring ICT/STEM entrants.” I think she is one amongst many that are important, though for reasons you may not grasp. Similarly, I think Admiral Hopper is important, for completely different reasons. I’d also list Marie Curie, Maud Menten, Jane Goodall, Sally Ride and Marissa Meyer (off the top of my head) as relevant role models to ICT and/or STEM, each and every one for a different reason.

The absolutist binary thinking of people in this thread scares me. On/off. This or that. “Addresses all cases or none of them.”

“Why don’t more [people in general, with women as an important subset] go into ICT and/or STEM” is a hugely complex topic. All sorts of people are needed to help solve it. What isn’t needed is snark, condescension and constantly trying to put people in boxes.

Solving the recruitment problem requires both making geeks less scary and the long, slow slog of decoupling geekdom from ICT/STEM in the public eye.

AND.

Not OR.

Footnotes:

First; you are correct, I did lash out at jake. That’s because I personally dislike him. Intensely. He may be playing the roll of troll online, or he may in fact be a gigantic douchenozzle in real life. The effect as far as I am concerned is identical. He is a downer. He rarely has anything positive to say, constantly criticises everything and everyone, except when he is agreeing with someone else’s criticism.

Most of his criticism is in the form of unprovable statements of opinion, and/or statements that are – at best – controversial. (I.E. there is no preponderance of evidence to prove his hypothesis versus any of the competing ones.) Indeed, he will often make statements that go against the preponderance of evidence, but which he asserts to be true because of his vastly superior intellect having carefully considered his personal experiences and extrapolated the sum totality of the human condition and the optimal life choices for all human beings on the face of this earth.

So I fell entirely confident in saying that his personality would remain a blight on any field he chose to occupy, and that any field evidencing a statistically higher-than-average percentage of individuals like him is likely to become one avoided by any number of subgroups.

Secondly, to put the pointless speculation about my “internet crush” to bed, Felicia Day isn’t it. I respect her immensely, but she is in the same category to me as Wil Wheaton: someone I want to interview, talk about their successes and failures, pick their brains and maybe even play some DnD with. My interest is professional, with respect for their roles as ambassador for my subculture.

They serve a role to me similar to that of “politician.” They represent a group of people (geeks), and we have elected them by popular acclaim. I’d certainly prefer them representing my subculture than Stephen Fry!

Re: There is another layer

Aye. I inherited a piece of beskpoke software recently myself. A little bit of genericisation, some setup routines...it's most of the way towards a SaaSy application. Would need some tweaking/customisation per user, but hey...that's where the money is...

Re: Bah.

They can "view" it any way they like. They simply can't ACT on it. As a society, we have decided that this is an acceptable practice, that a woman has control of her body and the right to decide whether or not she brings a pregnancy to term.

If they want to see this changed, there are forums available for them to utilise. From protesting to legislation. I would even (personally) accept DDoSes and certain forms of protest-style/DDoS-style robocalling. Childish, but nonviolent and non-invasive.

The line gets crossed when you either commit violence or you participate in the theft of personally identifiable information. Actual violence is unacceptable as a method of obtaining social change excepting under the most dire of circumstance. (I.E. your own government is committing genocide, sovereign nation is invading you, etc.)

Theft of personally identifiable information is right there in the same category as violence. That may seem nonsensical at first blush, but the sad reality is that the information has only to make it into the hands of extremists and then people start dying. Alternately, you end up with extremists perpetrating bigotry via stalking, employment discrimination, exercise of police/state authority discrimination etc.

There is a reason that our society has placed a critical value on personally identifiable information. Under many circumstances its release can get people killed. Dead. No longer alive. Not in some theoretical statistics but in the real world. Living, breathing, contributing members of society. Killed for anything from race to religious belief, sexual practices to “allowing multiculturalism” (shudder, really? As a Canadian who values our multiculturalism, and revels in the fact that we’re one of the few nations to successfully pull it off, the Oslo thing still haunts me.)

So they can view it any way they want. I will defend their right to protest abortion policy to the death, even as I campaign against their beliefs to the bitter end.

But they aren’t allowed to hurt anyone. And they aren’t allowed to steal information that can/will be given to other people to engage in same hurt.

Free speech has its limits.

And my personal religious tolerance ends at the point where that religion demands intolerance of - or harm to - others.