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  • Posts tagged "optimization"

“Scripting” is not sloppy “programming”

Every time I need to mention some automation development work while talking to a client, I find myself overly watchful not to say the words “scripting” or “script” excessively. That’s how much of “sloppiness” is felt to be connotative to those terms in the public opinion.

Ergo, you can see how glad I was to find in the Chapter 7 of the “UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook” this understanding that

There’s no real distinction between “scripting” and “programming.” Language developers sometimes take offense when their babies are lumped into the “scripting” category, not just because the label suggests a certain lack of completeness, but also because some scripting languages of the past have earned reputations for poor design.

Of course, the importance of scripting cannot be overestimated as it is the main mediator in performing administrative changes reliably, in a consistent and repeatable manner, which are so important in the system administrator’s job as in no other “soft” profession.

Speaking of the subtle differences between “scripting” and “programming”, one could point out the issue of computing system efficiency. Indeed, “scripted” procedures are often several times “slower” than “programmed” counterparts. Administrative work, however, is more about the effectiveness of the administrator, which is the efficiency of the binding administrator+computing_system. As the book authors put it,

Optimization can have an amazingly low return on investment, even for scripts that run regularly out of cron.

Which is more significant out of the two Linus Torvalds’ biggest invetions: Linux kernel of Git? – another great question from the book. On one hand, Linux (albeit not the kernel alone) in this very 5th edition of the book has ousted all the other Unix systems of other editions, including commercial ones – so, perhaps it is quite important. On the other hand,

Mistakes are a fact of life.

  • 7 Jul, 2018
  • (0) Comments
  • By Alex
  • Training

To upgrade or not to upgrade?

That’s another great sysadmin’s dilemma: do you do updates often, trying to keep your systems at the “cutting edge” and have all the security patches upplied immediately upon official release, or do you roll the updates out as discretely as possible, not trying to fix something that’s not [still] broken? That, and the fine topic of PXE, is discussed in the Chapter 6 of the “UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook”.

On one hand,

gratuitously upgrading systems costs time and money
…
Those who put these principles into practice must be willing to collect an extensive catalog of active releases.

On the other,

Patching outdated versions of the operating system is often infeasible, so administrators are faced
with the choice of skipping updates on some computers or crash-upgrading these machines to a newer internal release.

So what do you do? That’s your artful choice of balance between the two extremes.

 

Another controversial point of the chapter, about the notable superiority of APT  over YUM – they go as far as talking of APT as a superset of YUM, – makes me once again question, why would someone willfully choose Red Had or CentOS over Debian or even Ubuntu, barring the corporate pressure?

  • 6 Jul, 2018
  • (0) Comments
  • By Alex
  • Training

32-bit or 64-bit for Linux desktop?

Various Linux distros have long been offering both 32- and 64-bit options for download.

While traditionally 64-bit was tout as “For more than 4GB of RAM”, those downloads are gradually becoming more common. So I decided to investigate a little deeper into what’s wrong with running 64-bit on smaller systems.

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  • 5 Feb, 2013
  • (0) Comments
  • By Alex
  • /var/log, News

dataserv.exe: energy hog #1 from APC, not so “green”

This service from APC is supposed to take care of calculating energy usage.

The irony of this all is that this process holds one of the top positions in CPU hogs list. Take a look: it takes more CPU cycles than many of the most demanding processes in the system – virtual machines. (In other words, killing dataserv.exe would allow to run an extra full-fledged virtual computer!)
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  • 14 Apr, 2011
  • (4) Comments
  • By Alex
  • /var/log