[ale] Little OT: Bad Linux Sysadmin Practices

[Jim Kinney]

why would anyone ever bother to actually add up amps in a rack? so the
breaker is 20A and the load is 19.9A. what happens when a hard drive is
spun up? Oh! My pager goes off! Wow! An entire rack is down! On Sunday. And
I'm 65' in the air on a zip line 90 miles away from the DC. So who pulled
the "DO NOT USE" markers off the extra power strip outlets? So a
child-safety socket cover secured with red duct tape with black wide
sharpie that reads "NO!" clearly means remove tape and cover and plug in
your new server.

Backups are for weanies.

Real Admins have all _their_ important stuff on thumb drives. That they
just dropped down the elevator shaft through the crack between the floor
and the hall. Hmm.

The important part of data security to ensure that the successful RECOVERY
of data is never ever tested. It's much better in a crisis to be running
around trying to figure out HOW the recovery works to a different
version/system/network/planet when the server is down and it's payroll day
and 2 hard drives fell out of a RAID5 storage array not on a backup process
that ever succeeded in being tested. Good friends will be made that day.

Never, EVER label any system with it's name and IP address. This is best
when there are a zillion identical systems and none of the racks are
labeled. For absolute best effect, remove the room number form the door.



On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 3:54 PM, Jeff Hubbs <jhubbslist at att.net> wrote:

> Yeah, actually:  deciding that dual power supplies on servers were "for
> redundancy" - but not the right kind, and wiring each one up to separate
> circuits.  Do that all or most of the way up a rack until PDUs on both
> sides are nearly maxxed out, such that when one power supply fails, that
> server's entire load falls on the other PDU and trips its breaker - then
> the first PDU's break trips in milliseconds because the entire load just
> got dumped on it...crash the whole rack.  Of course, the bosses wouldn't
> listen to the EE major who saw this coming, and the guys who cabled up
> this house of horrors are probably still there...
>
> Wonder why I left the industry??
>
>
>
> On 10/11/12 3:30 PM, Boris Borisov wrote:
> >
> http://tuts.pinehead.tv/2012/10/10/how-to-make-your-boss-angry-bad-linux-sysadmin-practices/
> >
> > Can you add something to it ?
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-- 
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James P. Kinney III
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