Talk announcement – Dobrica Pavlinušić -‘Administering unique snowflake systems with 20 years of history’

Talk announcement – Dobrica Pavlinušić -‘Administering unique snowflake systems with 20 years of history’

Dobrica is a system librarian at Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb and also a geek with love for free software system. In his talk he will explain what to do when DevOps doesn’t help you because your environment consists of unique snowflake systems.

He works at an academic institution which over last 20+ years ended up with 109 virtual machines, 10 servers, 68 switches, 33 VLANs, 72 wireless access points, 73 network printers, 1022 public IPs serving 13924 users. Since we all know that cloud is other people’s computers, the topic will cover what we have to do if we are those people who manage infrastructure on which cloud is based, from perspective of graybeard sysadmin with 27 years of experience, of which 13 is taking care of systems described above.

What about backups, why is monitoring and central logging important, why do we track all devices and configuration in git, what we use for automation and why, how to document changes for easy recall, and is this manageable infrastructure or unmanageable mess? Since Unix philosophy is to have collection of small tools (and scripts) which work well together, what useful nuggets can we learn from our experience?