That’s the message of Matthew Haughey, who recently discussed the issue on his blog fortuitous.  Yet Haughey warns admin types about getting too human – thou shalt not become irrational, conceited, or vindictive, in other words.  Try bouncing your ideas off other moderators as a sort of “sanity check” before unleashing any wrath.

If you’re lacking moderators, find some alternative way to get the opinions of others and spread the workload.  In terms of keeping things clean, Haughey recommends “a simple user flagging system . . . .  It’s a basic mechanism that gives the community a policing outlet, but beyond the simple act of empowering users to help you moderate a large site, if you build the right toolset you can save yourself loads of time and stress moderating content.”

Community members can also help with site design issues – after all, they’re likely to have something invested in the place, as well.  Haughey writes, “When I have to make a tough decision, I mention it in a new thread and get the members’ reactions and often tailor the final result based on their feedback.”

Haughey’s post has some other helpful tips, but those are the highlights.  For more views on how to run an online community, you might turn to Steve Yelvington – by reading his article on the matter, you actually get to hear both his opinion and that of OSTG’s Robin Miller.

It’s not exactly been a banner year for the Windows brand. Microsoft released Vista in early 2007 only to be met with a lukewarm reception from both the enterprise and personal computing markets. Dell is also ramping up efforts to offer a Linux alternative to Windows for customers purchasing new computers from the store.

It’s not just the private sector, however, that is displaying hesitancy to upgrade to Windows Vista. Government agencies such as the Federal Aviation Administration have publicly acknowledged the fact that finding alternatives to Microsoft products, such as Linux-based operating systems and Google’s Premier Apps office suite, is becoming a higher priority.

The FAAs efforts in this regard seemed to have worked their way up the pipeline, as now the Department of Transportation, the entity under which the FAA is affiliated, has officially prohibiting upgrades to Windows Vista, as is the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Here’s an excerpt from a January DOT memo documenting the rational behind such a decision:

Based on our initial analysis (from internal recommendations and analysis provided by Gartner Group), there appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft products. Furthermore, there appears to be specific reasons not to upgrade including:

·    The cost of performing the upgrade (hardware/software upgrades, application upgrades, labor for planning and implementation, etc.)

·    Previous version compatibility concerns regarding Office 2007 suite components (primarily Word)

·    The protracted FY07 Continuing Resolution (CR) which limits available funding

·    The more to the new Headquarters DOT building that would be competing with the same IT expertise required to support the migration to any of these products

So, not only are these government agencies effectively banning the implementation of Windows Vista, but they are also preventing users from upgrading to the latest versions of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, a move that the top brass in Redmond can’t be too thrilled about.

Fans of the open-source Linux operating system have had a lot to chew on over the past several weeks, beginning with rumors that Dell is possibly exploring the option of offering Linux as one of the operating system choices to users that purchase new PCs through the online store.

Follow that up with today’s revelation that the Federal Aviation Administration is moving forward with an exploratory effort to gauge whether or not a switch to Linux would be in its best interests when Windows XP no longer becomes a viable option.

“We’re considering the cost to deploy [Windows Vista] in our organization. But when you consider the incompatibilities, and the fact that we haven’t seen much in the way of documented business value, we felt that we needed to do a lot more study,” says FAA spokesperson David Bowen in a TechNewsWorld article.

Along with considering a move to Linux, the FAA is also studying the feasibility of switching its office applications to Google’s new Premier Apps – a move that would most likely become a necessary consequence of an all out switch to the Linux operating system.

All told, the FAA will need to completely replace its fleet of 45,000 PCs within the next several years. Considering not only the cost of the hardware, but also of securing licenses from Microsoft for both Windows and Office for all of the machines, the alternative of implementing low-cost, open source software begins to look more and more appealing to organizations looking to tighten up the bottom line figures.

In it Venkat Devraj makes an interesting case for using decision automation, what I would call decision management, to automate database administration tasks. His notes about why scripts are a rotten approach to this kind of automation are perfect and apply to all possible uses of decision management.

Staying on an IT operations front it made me wonder what else might be amenable to decision management. How about these:

• Network reconfiguration when equipment is added/removed/fails
• Engineer assignment to problem equipment using location, urgency, skills etc
• Monitoring the network to see which service level agreements are going to be breached and proactively informing the agreement holders
• Routing helpdesk calls based on source, urgency etc
• Managing backup schedules using rules and predictive analytics to optimize the approach
• Self-service diagnostics for patches and versions to help people set up valid stacks (like Sun Preventive Services for instance)

I am sure there are others but these were just ones that popped into my head based on customers, especially in telecommunications. I am not sure what the prompt for using EDM to manage these might be (in terms of scale) but an IT department that believed in the approach and was having a hard time selling it to the business might consider them as internal proof points.

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There are multiple ways of doing this, but the basic answer is that you can do this very easily. MySQL ships with a set of utilities that ColdFusion can run via CFEXECUTE to perform various tasks.
So for example, to backup a database you can use the MySQL dump command:

mysqldump --user=USER --password=PASSWORD dbname > filename

From ColdFusion this would look look like so (username, passwords, and database names changed to protect the innocent):

<cfexecute name="c:program filesmysqlmysql server 4.1binmysqldump" arguments="--user=xxx --password=yyy dharma" outputfile="#expandPath("./ao.sql")#" timeout="30"/>

This creates a nice file that contains not only the SQL needed to create your database but all the data as well. You could then use a zip utility and move/mail/do whatever with the file.

Restoring is a bit trickier. You have to do different things based on if your database exists or not. If your database does exist, then the restore will overwrite the existing tables, but not remove tables that don’t exist in the backup file. If this doesn’t concern you, you can do it with this command:

mysql --user=USER --password=PASSWORD dbname < filename

Now I had a lot of trouble getting this to run from CFEXECUTE. I believe because of the <. So I used a bat file instead that looked like so:

"c:program filesmysqlmysql server 4.1binmysql.exe" --user=xxx --password=yyy somebackup < "c:apache2htdocstestingzoneao.sql"

I then ran the bat file from ColdFusion:

<cfexecute name="#expandPath("./restore.bat")#" timeout="30" variable="result"/>

Obviously you could make the bat file a bit more dynamic instead of hard coding everything.

For more information, check the MySQL 5 doc on backup and restoring databases.

Would folks be interested in a MySQL CFC wrapper? You know - in my spare time.

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Raymond Camden, ray@camdenfamily.com
http://ray.camdenfamily.com

Raymond Camden is Vice President of Technology for roundpeg, Inc. A long
time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books
and is the creator of many of the most popular ColdFusion community web
sites. He is an Adobe Community Expert, user group manager, and the
proud father of three little bundles of joy.

By including search functionality in the Deskbar, users of the GNOME desktop’s latest release can search their computers or the Internet without having to switch to a browser or other application.

Said GNOME in its release notes: “New to GNOME is the Deskbar. Power users, keyboard enthusiasts and users of the old panel command line will find this replacement incredibly powerful and easy to use. Deskbar uses plugins (written in Python) to provide search functionality for programs, files, folders, bookmarks, contacts and much more. Deskbar can also use the live search functionality of Google Live, Yahoo and Beagle.”

Users can enter a term into a search box, then select from a panel of search options. Those options can trigger a desktop event, like a program launch, or be used to search online sources like Google, Yahoo, and Answers.com.

As newer versions of popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and others become available, GNOME 2.14 will be included as a desktop option.

The GNOME Foundation also noted in a statement how its desktop is in use in some of the biggest government deployments of Linux in the world, such as those in Extremadura, Spain, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

With this release, the GNOME project has as of the current version a suite of administration tools available. It includes several tools to help administrators at enterprise-level businesses manage remote desktops, and improves access to PC lockdown tools.

The Pessulus lockdown editor puts a graphical interface on top of GNOME’s existing lockdown capabilities. Admins can prevent users from gaining command-line access to a machine, or keep them from shutting it down or rebooting.

Also, GNOME included the Sabayon profile editor. Admins can set up profiles and personalize them based on user roles in the business. Once created, the profiles can be deployed to machines destined for a user with a particular role.

Since the profiles are maintained centrally, admins can change them as needed in one place to affect all users of that profile.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

PM – A Project Management Rule: Make the project management setting a place where people can be their authentic selves without fear of judgement or mockery. Granting each other their legitimacy is the basis for the healthiest of relationships.

CRM – Achieving profitable, organic growth is never simple. Today, however, attracting and keeping profitable customer relationships seems even harder. New industry dynamics, changing customer demographics and outmoded marketing practices present considerable challenges to establishing the loyal customer relationships that are the foundation of growth.

PM – Any Project Management that are not well managed, and therefore go awry, are a drain on productivity and overall organizational effectiveness.

PM – Think of tasks as individual pieces of work which need to be done. Some typical tasks may include:

1. Reports to management,

2. Pieces of code for an application,

3. Project management definition documents,

4. Any small (or large) item that contributes to reaching the state goal of the project management.

CRM – Small and midsize companies have been able to implement more complete Customer Relationship Management CRM systems because they may not operate globally and may be newer organizations that have fewer business processes to contend with.

S. Maurer is a 53-year old college graduated IT professional, with 30 years of experience in the computer & technology business. Now is the Correspondence Courses Director of http://mba-open-university.net and http://distance-learning-mba-online-mba-program-executive-jobs.net.

The agreement provides for a total cash purchase price of $8 million plus the assumption of liabilities and payment of certain transaction costs.

“The Sonic Mobility acquisition adds a suite of software products for secure wireless systems administration and mobile device management on multiple platforms, including BlackBerry, Pocket PC, and Palm platforms,” stated John R. Cooper, president and chief executive officer of Avocent Corporation. “Avocent currently provides management and access solutions for fixed IT assets and believes the addition of Sonic Mobility’s proprietary products will expand our markets to include solutions for the fast-growing market for mobile IT assets.”

Sonic Mobility’s products include sonicadmin, software for mobile devices that allows management of network and data center infrastructure, sonicsecureweb, security software for intranet and extranet resource access from mobile handheld devices, and sonicsentry, a software solution for managing mobile devices centrally by IT administrators.

The sonicadmin software uses a real-time secure proxy model to perform many routine server administrative functions from a mobile device. For example, the administrator can reboot a server, unlock/change passwords, restart services not functioning properly, view event logs, move files and send messages to logged-in users. Microsoft has licensed sonicadmin to be the software that drives the Windows 2003 Mobile Admin Pack.

Sonic Mobility recently introduced sonicsentry, a software product for the remote control and administration of PDAs and smart phones that connect to a computer network. The new product adds a new level of network security for mobile devices. IT administrators can monitor all mobile devices for current status, apply passwords to unprotected devices and manage mobile user groups, as well as a number of other functions. For mobile devices that are lost or stolen, sonicsentry allows the IT administrator to centrally control and wipe out sensitive data. The product is ideally suited for networks that utilize cellular PDAs and smartphones to support staff in the field. Planned enhancements include over-the-air provisioning and configuration of devices, ideal applications for carriers that support a large number of mobile devices.

Sonic Mobility has strategic relationships with Palm, Microsoft, RIM, NetIQ, and RSA. Sonic Mobility has over 300 customers in 14 countries, including Lockheed Martin, FedEx, Principal Financial, the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Sonic Mobility CEO, Derek Ball, will join Avocent and will become Avocent’s Director of Business Development for Mobile Solutions. He will be joined by Dayton Foster, Sonic Mobility’s VP of Engineering, and the software development team. In connection with the acquisition, ten individuals who became non-executive officer employees of Avocent following the acquisition will be awarded a total of 40,000 employment inducement stock option grants by Avocent. These grants will have an exercise price equal to the closing share price today, September 1, 2004, and will vest over a period of four years under terms that are substantially similar to the 2003 Avocent Corporation Stock Option Plan that was approved by Avocent’s shareholders in 2003.

“We have already begun to integrate Sonic Mobility’s mobile device solutions into future Avocent products,” continued Mr. Cooper. “The combination of sonicadmin with our DSView and DSAdmin products will extend our management solutions to mobile devices. We are also excited about the potential of the continued development of sonicsentry and the large market opportunities for remote wireless management of mobile devices. We believe this is a very attractive market for Avocent and look forward to developing it with Derek Ball, Dayton Foster and the Sonic Mobility team.”

The acquisition is not expected to have a material effect on Avocent’s third quarter results, except for a to-be-determined charge for acquired in-process research and development.

SysAdminNews | Real world information for system administrators working in diverse networking environments, including Windows, Linux, UNIX, and more. These are the practical tips that help your work day go smoothly.

Day after day, week after week they are in the office, slogging away making sure the work gets done. Many of them are so conscientious they won’t take time out and stay at their desks until the work is done. Not only are they integral to the running of any business, their income and the way they are treated may not always reflect the importance of their role.

Jenny’s Story

Jenny has worked for her current employer, for the past three years and thoroughly enjoys her role as Personal Assistant to the General Manager. They have a great working relationship. Whenever she needs time off to attend her children’s sports days and special events, it’s never an issue. If she requires the occasional afternoon or morning off to deal with personal matters, all she has to do is ask. Because of this attitude with her employer, she does her utmost best in her work and never thinks twice about working overtime on the odd occasion. In fact she works twice as hard.

This is a totally different situation to Jenny’s previous employer. Jenny had been working for another organisation where her boss was ‘married to the job’. Although he had a wife and family, his behaviour didn’t reflect this. He worked all hours of the day and night and couldn’t understand why everyone else went home at 5.00 p.m. Although she did her utmost best to organise him and get the work done on time, he would always ask for tasks to be done just when she was getting ready to leave for the day.

On the many occasions when she worked back or took work home so that her boss would have what he wanted for the next morning,he never thanked her. He just assumed that’s what she should do. He never considered her needs. She was a single parent and therefore had major responsibilities. She had a life too. Her boss on the other hand was fortunate to have a a wife who didn’t work and took care of their personal life.

Prior to Jenny being in this role, there had been three other people who had worked in her position, and all three had lasted less than three months.

Jenny had enough, she left after 6 months and found her current position. It wasn’t the money that was her main issue. It was the flexibility and appreciation. Although her boss was pleasant enough, he just didn’t understand that there is more to working with someone than just paying their wages.

The Final Word

When employing staff make sure they are the right fit. If you’re looking for someone who can be extremely flexible in their hours and can come in early and stay late, then make sure that person is in the right personal situation to do that.

Employing people is a skill in itself. Keeping them happy so that they will be an important part of your business is another story. As mentioned in prior newsletters, when you look after your people, they will look after you and your business.

Lorraine Pirihi is Australia’s Personal Productivity Specialist and Leading Life Coach. Her business The Office Organiser specialises in showing small business owners and managers, how to get organised at work so they can have a life! Lorraine is also a dynamic speaker and has produced many products including “How to Survive and Thrive at Work!”

To subscribe to her free ezine visit www.office-organiser.com.au

Sys Admin (samag.com) is running a series on “Python in Systems Administration” that will tackle the following four themes and their relations:

Focus on Flexibility

Of these, the most challenging to explain is what I call the “scripting mentality”, or scripting attitude. This mentality suspects an application that meets all nominal requirements will also be too “heavy” and difficult to be used effectively. For scripters, a better strategy for solving problems is a simple scripting interface that allows users to “snap together” their own solutions. The idea is to provide building blocks that are flexible and simple to understand.

This idea can be a hard pill to swallow at times, because it conflicts with the “code re-use” imperative we all learn. Tim Peters is a senior engineer with Zope Corporation whose standing in the Python community is second only to Python’s inventor, Guido van Rossum. Peters once made the case in these words: “It’s easier to write appropriate code from scratch in Python than to figure out how to use a package profligate enough to contain canned solutions for all common and reasonable use cases.”

“Find” provides a good example of this contrast in styles. Windows has a “Find” application available through the standard “Start” button. This Find is easy to use, in that end-users regularly take advantage of it without documentation: point, click, and type in a file name, and a list of matches appears.

The Unix find utility, on the other hand, is notorious for its obscurity. Few people remember all its options, and beginners frequently mistype even its simplest forms. The command-line utility scales much, much better, though. Windows “Find” makes a few searches very easy, but is frustrating if you need anything beyond the scope of its standard forms. Unix’s find emphasizes orthogonality, so you can freely combine predicates in any combination, even those unimagined by the designers of the utility. Once you learn its minimal syntax, it’s a small step to request, for example, a list of all files with a certain extension, created or modified in the last week, which are at least a megabyte in size, except those owned by a particular user. Windows simply doesn’t consider the possibility.

The Unix find also plays nicely with other applications; it’s easy to combine it with third-party filters. Windows, however, gives no such opportunity, apart from tedious cutting-and-pasting of results.

This emphasis on flexibility and power will recur throughout this series on Python in systems administration. Python rarely gives systems administrators finished solutions; it almost always provides highly capable and reliable tools we can use to solve specific problems in just a few lines of readable code. Enthusiasm for such an opportunity is the “scripting mentality” this series aims to transmit.

Easy Scripting

A few examples of working code illustrate Python’s advantages as a scripting language. Suppose you occasionally need to restore files pulled from a backup tape. From the Unix command line, you might request:

In practice, it is often useful to package up even such a simple command as a one- or few-line script; if you don’t work with it every day, you might not remember the exact name of the tape device, or the syntax for file names. Generalize the command above, then, into the shell file my_restore:

While Python can do the same, and even without the minor expense of grep as an external process, it has no advantage over sh for simple pipelines:

If Python is no more succinct than sh for such simple tasks, why should it interest systems administrators? It shouldn’t, except that our jobs never stay this simple. As tasks become even slightly more complex, two potent Python advantages become apparent:

• Python’s sophisticated data structures — including dictionaries, first-class functions, full-fledged objects, and more — are far more capable than the crude string-based values and variables of sh.
• Python truly is the “batteries-included” language. Once we’ve gone to the minimal trouble of writing my_restore.py in Python, all the riches of the built-in Python libraries are available. The next section of this article shows how it takes only a few more lines to add a useful graphical user interface (GUI) to my_restore. It’s not just a GUI that Python provides, either; it’s equally straightforward to add network services, sophisticated calendar arithmetic, database interfaces, XML processors, host monitors, or much, much more.

Too often, systems administrators resign ourselves to the fiction that there’s a sharp boundary between what we do, and “real programming”. One of Python’s great achievements is to demonstrate a gentle, smooth transition from few-line scripting to sophisticated, polished automation that exploits all a platform offers. Add Python to your personal toolkit, and you immediately expand the range of applications you can complete within a demanding schedule.

Wrap It Attractively

Python’s built-in ability to construct GUIs is a good example. Let’s touch up this restore program so that a user can control its operation through a simple GUI. The goal will be to launch it, as before, with a simple command-line invocation such as my_restore.py FILENAME. Rather than extracting all matches for FILENAME, though, this version of my_restore.py presents a list of selections. The user selects only the file instances he truly wants restored (see Figure 1).

Python requires only a few additional lines to implement such a GUI:

This example dramatizes the contrast with sh and other conventional administrative scripting languages. While a few lines in each suffice for simple tasks, requiring a GUI or other common features quickly outstrips the ability of the usual shell languages. If you’re coding in Python, though, a solution demands only a few more lines.

Here’s the strategy, then — adopt Python as one of your preferred scripting languages. Use it for the day-to-day chores that wise sys admins solve by scripting. When you return to the same task in eight months, you’ll find your well-written Python source so readable that you don’t need ancillary READMEs or instruction sheets or recipes. Moreover, when you need more serious development (e.g., a GUI for a little task, or service of remote requests), Python will be ready to express your new version with modest incremental effort.

Over the coming months, I’ll compose several scripts that solve specific problems that often arise in systems administration. Future installments will also focus on how Python not only makes essential things easier, but also makes important things possible.

In the meantime, you can find more information on the topics mentioned in this article at these sites:

Tutorial on find — http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Find.html

The original christening of Python as the “batteries included” language —

http://web.archive.org/web/20001013152452/

http://sunworld.com/swol-12-1998/swol-12-regex.html

“Python is an Agile programming language” — http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3060

*Originally published at http://www.samag.com

Cameron Laird is a full-time developer for independent consultancy Phaseit, Inc.He writes and speaks frequently on open source and other technical topics. Most of his own development work has been in systems programming and on the server side. You can contact him at claird@phaseit.net.