06.30.08

cfengine

Posted in life at 9:03 pm by mridley

When I started at my current place of employment, we were just transitioning support of a medium sized UNIX environment from another company which had been supporting the installation previously.  Unfortunately there was no system automation in place and all changes and updates had to be done manually.

Having been a UNIX systems engineer for a long time, I’m not a fan of manual configuration.  It’s time intensive and error prone.  So I set about configuring a cfengine installation using Subversion for revision control of the configuration files.  My team mates were not familiar with cfengine or Subversion, so I documented their use on our internal wiki.

I’ve had occaision to set up fresh cfengine configurations at several contracting clients now, and it occurs to me that while cfengine is incredibly powerful and useful it can be a bit overwhelming for new users even if they are experienced UNIX administrators.

In my copious free time (yeah, right!) I should start a consulting business around system process automation using cfengine with revision control for more managable and scalable infrastructures.

06.06.08

Time for Another Update

Posted in life at 10:51 pm by mridley

Still alive.  Still busy.  Still no time to make much progress on the super cool projects I want to work on.  Story of my life.

The job is going well, although I am completely swamped from the moment I walk in to the moment I go home.  Sometimes I have 15 minutes to go to the drive-thru for lunch.  That’s not a bad thing, it just means that I’m pretty drained after work and haven’t made much progress on keeping this site updated, my People Keeper, etc.

My friend Nicole and I are working on starting a web design/marketing company which has been taking up whatever minimal free time I might otherwise have had.  Hopefully that will get off the ground.  I’m hoping she can take the lead on it, as my schedule is just so packed.

I did take break last weekend and went camping with some friends at Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, VA.  It was a good time.  I’m not much for camping, but there’s something to be said for having zero cell phone reception for two days.