Innovation in Software

For the last few years I’ve been involved in the co-ordination around the Manchester BSD User Group meetings (first Tuesday of the month, Briton’s Protection, Great Bridgewater Street), because I’ve been so heavily involved in running BSD systems over the years. In fact, I think this Summer marks the 9th year of me running BSD kit. In Unix terms that makes me a baby, but back then many of us were still running FreeBSD 2.x which would make the current crop of young admins nauseous. No package management, no easy deployment, lots of fiddling with drivers to get things working: it was real frontier land back then.

However, due to server consolidation and the fact that the cost of dedicated servers in the UK with FreeBSD are either not an option or prohibitively expensive, something bad just happened:

I no longer admin any BSD machines.

This site is now on a Debian server, and is likely to remain so for some time. All of my current projects deploy out to Linux boxes (some of them in unusual corners of the globe). The closest I can get is that the machine I’m writing this on is OS X which has FreeBSD userland under the skin.

Somehow this bothers me more than I thought it should. BSD (specifically FreeBSD) has been a staunch and loyal friend over the years to me, and without it my work would have been harder, less enjoyable and I wouldn’t have met some of the amazing people I have over the years through the BSD scene.

I expect in about 12 months I’ll be in a position to be buying new hardware of my own rather than leasing somebody else’s kit, but by then I expect it’ll be more economical to be on an elastic cloud based on Xen than it will be to own my own iron in a data centre. Even if it makes sense to own the iron, there is a good chance I might be going down the Solaris route as I like some of the virtualisation work they’re doing. In other words, I’m not sure if BSD is in my future outside of a hobby interest.

For now then, I’ll still be going to the BSD meets, and I’ll probably even try and keep a box running somewhere so I can track -CURRENT, but today is a sad day for me: I don’t know the next time I’ll cvsup the ports tree and portupgrade. I don’t know the next time I’ll be thankful for the sane and consistent documentation of the system I’m using. I don’t know the next time I’ll feel like I’m using a real Unix built by real Unix people.

What I do know is that I’ll always think of the BSD distros out there as the best open source Unix on the planet, and the people working on them as the best developers bar none. Thanks to all of them for their hard work and keeping me entertained whilst earning my rent for the last decade.

I’ve been bullied (kind of) into talking about naming conventions for machines.

For the uninitiated, there is a tradition within the Unix sys admin community to naming your machines something a little bit more exciting than “print-server” or “backup1” or whatever.

My laptop is called Stinky for historical reasons. My very favourite laptop ever was an IBM Thinkpad 240. It was small, light, and it traveled all over the World with me. From the Falklands to France, it was a brilliant workhorse. However, as is the case with Thinkpads, you have to slightly hate it. First it was the Stinkpad, then it was Stinky. Over time, people learned to refer to it directly so when I moved to the iBook I’m writing this on, I couldn’t give up the name – and so that’s the story.

I used to name machines all sorts of weird things. At Telinco, the server known as Harvey was known as “my” machine. It was followed by Jake and Elwood. All film references I’d expect you to recognise. My WiFi AP name is a top secret name that I will not divulge, except to say it’s an acronym for how somebody once described me.

I’m also looking after a couple of servers for a friend named until recently after members of the A-Team. Hannibal, Muroch (we spelled it wrong), Face, Baracus were all there at one point or another. Baracus is still running, but it’s now accompanied by Frank named for Frank Spencer. My friend likes his TV. :-)

I’m more inclined these days to giving functional useful names to servers. It might not be much fun, but it really does help when you’re looking after hundreds of servers to not have to think about where r4-s10 is – it’s in the name.

As this is meant to be a meme where I get to bully others, I’ll ask Andy (again!), but I can’t think of too many others out there who have both a blog and a likely naming scheme. I reserve the right to update this post as and when…