My current employer has a problem with managing scale. Bad habits and lack of consistency have led to an environment of never-ending one-offs that result in extended downtime, employee burnout, and loss of productivity. To fully grasp the scope of the current situation, We must look at the issues we currently suffer from, and the cost incurred by them.

Two issues: Builds and …Everything Else

Builds have been a sore point for our for our team for some time. Common complaints involve:

• Reliance on a proprietary tool (HP RDP), which is windows based and owned by another team
• Reliance on DNS entries for the build process, which may take days to go through
• Lack of Tribal knowledge of the build process (only 2 team members are fully educated in it)
• Lack of visibility and documentation of the process and details
• Lack of centralized account management ownership
• Slow to resolve issues with build (no default jdk install, ulimit)
• Newly built servers are not up to date (patched)
• Aged distributions (SLES 9, SLES 10) require hardware-specific drivers on newer hardware.

Beyond our build problems, we have further issues:

• Lack of centralized, Tiered, or Channeled patching.
• Unreliable naming conventions.
• Heavy ramp-up time

While we have done our best to address some of these non-build issues, only a full revamp of the build process will address the underlying problems.

Resulting Costs: Time and Money

The repercussions of our build issues have both obvious and indirect costs.

Things that Cost Time

• Builds require DNS Changes: RDP requires DNS entries, which require Change Request windows. This can roadblock a project for up to two days.
• Inconsistency: Tracking down simple production issues require intimate domain knowledge due to the sheer number of one offs.
• Lack of Visibility: Without domain knowledge, the steps to tracking down an issue requires extensive sleuthing to fight the right servers, pools, projects, irules, etc.
• Lack of Auditing: With no mechanism within the team to “circle back” and clean up after ourselves, unresolved issues sit for months, resulting in confusion later.
• Lack of up-to-date Documentation: Much of our documentation is woefully out of date, leading to poor decisions based on bad intel.
• Lack of Instrumentation: Applications consist of multiple layers, but due to firewall, code, authentication and DNS constraints, Applications cannot easily be tested at all layers.
• High Ramp-up time for New Employees: Time is wasted for both the new employee and trainer to learn all of the nuances.
• Context Thrashing: Humans aren’t nearly as good at multitasking as they think. The constant thrash of interruptions reduce efficiency.

Things that Cost Money

• Licensing: Only a small minority of our servers have valid SLES licenses, making update costs somewhat dubious. Updates via OpenSuse/CentOS are a viable option, but places us in a hybrid environment.
  • Suse quoted around $260k to fully license and support
  • Red Hat quoted significantly more to fully license and support
• Support: Hardware support, software support, offshore support are not cheap.

Suggested Solution

The suggested solution to this predicament is a ground up redesign of our environment, starting with our baseline installation and building on our recently introduced conventions. Simplification and refactoring are the targets, since they will allow for better management at scale. Whenever a design decision is made, the ops team should be involved to discuss it.

Baseline Build: Commercial/Community Hybrid model

Two things prevent us from going with a completely community-supported build- Business Insecurity and third-party support.

• Business Insecurity is an internal requirement to “call someone if something breaks,” which may or may not be used (or even helpful). Finding a solution is often quicker and easier through community support via online chat, google searches and social networking.
• Third-party support is an external requirement where a company like Oracle will only support their product on a blessed distribution, despite the difference being in name only. As long as you are running on a licensed distribution, you are usually supported, regardless of the individual packages installed, meaning a RHEL-licensed server could pull packages from a CentOS source.

The primary differences between SLES/OpenSuse and RHEL/CentOS is the source of the packages and the trademarks. Regardless of distribution, maintaining our packages via an internal centralized source is possible, with licensing only used when “Vendor support” is required by a third party application.

RHEL/CentOS is suggested for baseline build for a number of reasons:

• Market Penetration: RHEL has a 60-70% market share, meaning third party support will be better and sysadmin skills will be more commonplace (hence cheaper).
• Larger Community Support: based on Support channels and various other sources, RHEL has the larger community.
• Owns JBoss: RHEL could provide support and training at discounted rates.
• Clean Slate:  Switching distributions forces a clean-slate re-evaluation of our practices.

Base Package Set and Base Configuration Overlay

Server installation

Conventions over Configuration

Plainly Labeled

Consolidation

Upgrade path

How This Reduces Costs and Man-Hours

Concerns

Implementation Examples to resolve outstanding issues

As I prepare to switch to Hugo, I’ve decided to go back through my drafts and publish unfinished works that have some value.  This article was last edited Jan 22nd, 2013.

The Moose is a special prize within the programming and IT communities. It is claimed, not awarded. The way it works is that you will catch yourself doing something stupid (by your standards), and you will then “claim The Moose.” When you do so you must announce that you are in custody of The Moose, so the next person that takes it knows where to go to find it. The Moose should be displayed in an area of high visibility on or near your workstation.

Notice that the Moose is claimed, it is not awarded. If you catch something that is so stupid as to be spectacular, and it affects the whole team (for example, somebody breaks the build AND then commits the broken code into the repository) then the person is AWARDED a different prize: The Albatross. The moose hunts you. You try and try to evade it but the moose stalks you like fog in the night.

“Listen, and understand. That Moose is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are exposed.”

Found this here, which fortunately fixed my issue with 3 lines:

sudo mv /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts_old
sudo cp /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts_old/* /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/
sudo ln -s /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

Because I don’t know when to stop, I’m going to start working on upgrades for my printer.

1. Filament Guide

Apparently one of the common problems is that slack in the filament can cause tangles- the best way to work around this is a filament guide. The first filament guide I printed was loose- too loose to use by itself. The second style just didn’t print properly, even trying to print it 2 different ways. I ended up using a command strip to stick the first one in place, and that seems to be working for the time being. Perhaps later I can modify the model and make it a little better fit.

2.  Thumbwheels

Another common problem is that the all-metal thumbwheels will jiggle free over time, causing the bed to unlevel. The Solution is to use nylon locking nuts (nylock nuts) , but they’re so tiny you wouldn’t be able to adjust them- that’s where the 3d printed thumbwheels come in. The nylocks go on the underside of the printed thumbwheel, allowing better control and a more coarse texture than the metal thumbwheels. So far they’re working well.

3. Octoprint

While it’s not a direct mod, I printed a 3d case for a raspberry pi and loaded the pi with a custom OS called Octoprint. It controls the printer over USB so you’re not constantly inserting and removing sdcards. In addition, it gives you a nice web interface where you can upload your gcode files, track the print progress, and tweak configurations. It even lets you time-lapse control a pi camera to see the status and verify things haven’t went off the rails.

4. Allen Wrench and Scraper Hook Support

This is more of a utility modification than anything- with the 3d prints, you usually need to scrape the print off the bed when it’s complete, which means you have a standard scraper always laying around. This gives you a hook to store the scraper on, as well as slots to place the allen wrenches.

5. Fun Fan cooler

My original intention was to go with the Dii cooler, but after some investigation I came across the fun fan cooler, which looks like an earwig’s behind.  it has a few print flaws which I’m going to attempt to fix and re-release it on thingiverse. So far it’s greatly improved the quality of my prints. Update: My attempt to fix the model failed miserably. I still have a lot to learn about organic modelling.

6. Pi Cam Arm

I’ve found a decent arm/camera holster for my raspberry pi camera, which should allow me to create timelapse videos. I still don’t have a great base due to the short cable I’m working with, but that should be remedied tomorrow. In the mean time, here’s a video:  https://goo.gl/photos/AiX6PCX5Z45nR1Bu8  This was my second print of the Earwig vent/ Fun Fan Cooler.

7. Glass Bed

My glass bed has arrived, but the thermal pad won’t be here until Saturday. Between now and then I’ll have to print clips.

Future Plans

Right now I’m planning on the following upgrades:

1. Z braces. I saw the tower shake a surprising amount during quick y axis movements- Z braces basically add a hypotenuse to the intersecting structure of the printer. The ones I’m looking at will have levelling feet. Update: Unfortunately, these are for the maker select, not the select plus, so they won’t fit. I’ll need to design my own.
2. Metal Hotend with slotted block. Microswiss makes a nice hotend that supposedly works much better.
3. Hardened steel nozzle. Another Microswiss upgrade that’ll let me work with a wider array of materials and temperatures.
4. Machined lever and extruder plate. The existing level that holds the filament in place will warp over time- this one won’t.

Overall this has been an interesting diversion so far.