IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann

Desperately Seeking Interop 2008 Las Vegas

Harper Mann — 2008-04-27T16:32:45-08:00

Off to Interop. Energy camp looks pretty interestinghttp://www.energycamp.org/. I'm looking forward to seeing what's new in green data centers and the rest of the show. I'm also going to visit the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) which will be interesting for me since I've never been to a Microsoft only show before. https://www1.mms-2008.com/ Should be fun. More posting more often soon.... READ MORE

Transforming ITIL to Agile

Harper Mann — 2008-03-27T16:03:13-08:00

It's just dawned on me that Agile development won't work if it's only something the dev group is doing. It has to be part of how the whole operation. As an example, you can't have product managers going through a long waterfall process to create a 90 page PRD to be handed to the Agile guys. The PRD won't match up with the Agile process. The PMs have to get with the Agile program if Agile is going to be successful. Even if everyone approves of dev doing Agile, and there is no resistance to it, Agile won't be... READ MORE

Visualization Coolness

Harper Mann — 2008-03-13T10:27:56-08:00

I'm a big fan of TED (www.ted.com), inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers. Many of the talks have amazing visualizations. This one by Hans Rosling has been around for a while, but I like it a lot. The TED talks are fascinating. While perhaps not strictly IT, they are so creative that after watching them I feel like I can solve any IT problem. At least they put IT perspective which is often helpful when solving problems. The talks have been great to share with my team and have made for great discussions and problem solving,... READ MORE

Change Detection

Harper Mann — 2008-02-27T14:58:54-08:00

Wouldn't it be great if you could map your server configuration changes to all the other events happening on your systems? It turns out you can and on one display. Splunk has added configuration management to it's feature set so you can now tell Splunk to log changes to particular files or directories. Check out Splunk File System Change Monitor This is a preview release, but it's cool since it adds CM to Splunk's ability to powerfully index whatever you can get it to eat, and it will eat most things. While CM systems detect and log change, and provide... READ MORE

Green IT Machine

Harper Mann — 2008-02-19T20:17:36-08:00

There is a lot of green going on. I've just started looking into Green Data Centers. What are you doing that's green in your Data Center? Here are some links: The Green Grid Cut Server Room Power Intel Goes Greener IBM Becomes More Energy Efficient It seems to me one of the first things you want to do is figure out what your actual energy consumption is so you can tell if something you do to make green accomplishes anything. Large system vendors are starting to offer tools to figure out data center power consumption and cooling requirements. EMC has... READ MORE

Continuous Training

Harper Mann — 2008-02-11T10:57:20-08:00

It interesting how often IT people are left to their own devices as far as training is concerned. Some shops seem to think IT training is a needless expense they want to avoid or worse they think training someone will make them want to leave the company for greener pastures. I've never understood why there is fear about training. There is a lot of evidence training improves IT efficiency. Here's an article from The Register with the data: Are your staff adequately trained? Training is critical for a lot of reasons. Aside from simply enabling staff to do better with... READ MORE

Community and Cooperation are the Keys to Success!

Harper Mann — 2008-02-01T22:51:52-08:00

In the old days, IT industry players were all about proprietary systems. The plan was to get the customer locked in to a particular company and to make it trouble for them to work with any other vendor. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) had their line of stuff, HP had theirs and Big Blue stuff set the pace for not working with anyone else. About the time of the UNIX client / servers, TCP was invented and cleaned up enough to connect a few computers. This changed the social environment as well, as customer demanded the ability to move their... READ MORE

Ignoring the source code is akin to an ostrich sticking its head in the sand

Harper Mann — 2007-10-17T11:33:30-08:00

eWeek's Jim Rapoza recently released a slide show called 10 Things You Should Know About Open Source. I admit, I love lists and I love the perspectives laid out here. You'll need to visit the slide show for more info, but here's the list ... 1. Check the label 2. Not just for coders 3. Forks feed open source 4. You can ignore the source 5. GPL is not a social(ist) disease 6. Open source is no secret society 7. Open Source in Windows-friendly 8. Releasing the code isn't enough 9. Watch out for orphans 10. Dog the bounty hunters... READ MORE

Remember when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?

Harper Mann — 2007-09-19T12:50:47-08:00

If you have the chops, your open source software project should lead and inform your commercial product. Red Hat and Ubuntu have done this brilliantly. Fedora precedes RHEL. Feisty goes before supported Gutsy. Both companies have rabid communities who gobble new code and contribute back fixes and improvements. The developer communities are happy to get cool new stuff. The commercial guys get better fit and finish. The early users are often the production guys as well, so they value early experience and use it to influence the production code. It's a quality loop and better for everybody. Success with this... READ MORE

My downloads is bigger than yours!

Harper Mann — 2007-09-13T17:03:42-08:00

My downloads is bigger than yours! CNET's Matt Asay posted an interesting blog today titled The Open Source Volume Myth. I believe his post succinctly pulls the covers off the value of the download metric that many feel is the best barometer of success in open source. Maybe in certain instances, sure. But in commercial open source (which I loosely define as a company trying to monetize their particular open source business model), that dog won't hunt. Déja vu back to the late nineties when all the internet-related start-ups thought their future fortunes were linked to oodles and oodles of... READ MORE

It's all about working together

Harper Mann — 2007-09-13T09:54:49-08:00

Systems and network monitoring is often a second or third order concern in IT organizations. The team usually agrees it's a good idea, but never seems to quite get monitoring set up and, more importantly, embedded into the IT process so it's kept up-to-date. When monitoring is up-to-date, it completes an ideal quality circuit that provides not just accurate feedback about how IT and the team are functioning, but also advertises what the team has done for the company lately. Unfortunately, monitoring is complicated. Most IT shops have purchased "big iron" monitoring tools that turned out to be larger projects... READ MORE

Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?

Harper Mann — 2007-08-27T18:25:40-08:00

Companies that respond to Open Source communities have the advantage: the old proprietary ways are over. IBM got this and has done well with projects like XCat and Eclipse. But, companies vary in their ability to participate in open source. Some companies aren't able to go beyond posting a demo on SourceForge. It's a demo for a commercial product because there isn't a community producing patches and product direction behind it. It's just a company calling itself open source for marketing gain without contributing to the community. One sign of this is when the company moves the discussion forum for... READ MORE

Open Source Outsourcing

Harper Mann — 2007-08-16T16:16:18-08:00

Companies that are strong with the Open Source force gain code contributions and testing from their OS communities. This has become critical since feedback from users needs to be direct to the developers or feature requests get lost in the translation. When a bug has to travel from support -> operations -> marketing -> product management -> QA -> Eng management -> engineering -> coder, you get the telephone game effect. Avoiding this commercial vendor daisy chain is one of the underpinnings of Open Source projects that make them robust. The smart software companies like Google and Red Hat know... READ MORE

Outsource!

Harper Mann — 2007-08-14T13:36:58-08:00

I often see very smart programmers who are working hard but perhaps not so smart. It’s hard in they need to grind out code to get something done; it’s not so smart because they often code stuff a junior "code pig" could and would like to write. Why not hire someone and outsource the coding? This would relieve core smart people to address other problems. Marketing guru Geoffrey Moore speaks of core vs. context, and recommends outsourcing anything that's not core. In an open source company, it’s important to define what the core activities are. I think there are several.... READ MORE

Ask The Experts: It's What Project Leads Really Want

Harper Mann — 2007-08-01T15:45:12-08:00

Project leads are good at a lot of things, like thoroughly understanding the ins and outs of their projects, keeping things on track, and getting problems solved. The downside of being so good at the job is that they become immersed in the details and demands of running their projects and spend less time face-to-face with the people who are using them (let's face it, email is not the same). The people at GroundWork know the value of getting people together in person. For the second year in a row, they're sponsoring an Open Source Council, bringing together "lead developers... READ MORE