SysAid's SysAdmin Day Song

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Get ready for SysAdmin Day on July 29

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Custom distro hammers hardware to detect system failures

By Joe Brockmeier


One of the things I love about Linux? You can do so many interesting things with it. Take, for example, Breakin [1] — a stress-testing and hardware diagnostic tool that will put hardware through its paces to make sure it's production-ready. The 3.2 release was announced today with the addition of several new utilities and improvements to its user interface.

Breakin is a distribution to run diagnostics on systems to find hardware issues or component failures. Put together by Advanced Clustering Technologies [2], Breakin is a Linux-based live CD that tests memory, the CPU, hard drives, (supported) temperature sensors, and looks for any Machine Check Exception (MCE) errors generated during the tests.

Hard to use? Nope. The default mode doesn't require any feedback. Pop it in, and let it run. It runs from CD or DVD, USB keys, or if you do a lot of hardware testing you can provide the image over the network for hardware that supports PXE booting. They recommend letting it hammer the hardware for at least 24 hours, but longer is better. You can even peek in on the testing results remotely via SSH — so this is a nice little tool to have if you're renting dedicated servers in a remote facility.

It's not all about hammering hardware, though. Breakin also includes a number of utilities so it can be used as a rescue environment as well. If you're using Breakin to diagnose hardware problems on systems in production, this can come in fairly handy.

Why is Advanced Clustering Technologies developing Breakin? ACT president and CEO says that the company had looked around for a tool that would "adequately" test hardware before they ship it to customers — but they struck out. "Most commercial software you find for this is very inadequate — many are still based on DOS, others are Windows-based and require you to install an OS first before running the test. Our needs were something that could be automated into our production environment, and something we could re-distribute to our customers in case servers starting having problems once deployed."

Breakin is (almost) fully open source and can be downloaded as a pre-built image, or grab the source using git [1] and modify and build it yourself. (It uses the Intel MKL library and AMD's Core Math Library, which are not open source.) The company is hoping for feedback from the community on its performance on a wider range of hardware. It's tested on ACT's servers and workstations, but should also work on a wide range of Intel/AMD servers.

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U.S. Renewables Outpace Nuclear Power

R. Colin Johnson 


• The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that renewable energy sources in total have surpassed nuclear power, and are likely to widen the gap unless new nuclear plants are built.U.S production of energy from renewable sources recently passed that from nuclear reactors despite administration efforts to revitalize U.S. nuclear power generation with federal loan guarantees for constructing new nuclear reactors.
  In his 2011 State of the Union speech, President Obama said, "We need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country."
  Obama's attempt to paint nuclear energy green, however, was before the nuclear disaster in Japan, which has prompted nations worldwide to back away from nukes, including Germany which has pledged to concentrate on renewable energy and shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022.
  The Obama Administration, on the other hand, is currently proposing to add $36 billion to the current $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for new nuclear power plant construction in its FY2011 budget, bringing the total to $54 billion—nearly tripling the money currently available for new nuclear reactors.
  
  
  
  Renewable energy passed that of nuclear power in March 2011 (in quadrillion BTUs). (Source: Energy Information Administration)  
  Meanwhile the world continues to reel from the triple meltdown at the Fukushima-daichi nuclear complex in Japan. Efforts there have been plagued by problems and missteps.
  In the wake of this continuing fiasco, one bright light shines--namely, that renewable energy sources have already passed nuclear power generation in the U.S. and are on-track to outpace oil too.
  The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that renewable energy sources--which include hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal, and bio-mass/fuels--were responsible for 0.805 quadrillion BTUs of energy, or about 17 percent of the total U.S. energy generation, in March 2011. Nuclear, on the other hand, provided 0.687 quadrillion BTUs, or about 14.5 percent, according to EIA estimates.
  Comparing the entire first quarter of 2010 to 2011, renewable energy sources rose about 15 percent, according to the EIA, and compared with the first quarter of 2009, renewable energy rose over 25 percent, marking accelerated growth in 2011.
   

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The future of IT will be reduced to three kinds of jobs

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By Jason Hiner

Takeaway: The IT profession and the IT job market are in the midst of seismic changes that are going to shift the focus to three types of jobs.

There’s a general anxiety that has settled over much of the IT profession in recent years. It’s a stark contrast to the situation just over a decade ago. At the end of the 1990s, IT pros were the belles of the ball. The IT labor shortage regularly made headlines and IT pros were able to command excellent salaries by getting training and certification, job hopping, and, in many cases, being the only qualified candidate for a key position in a thinly-stretched job market. At the time, IT was held up as one of the professions of the future, where more and more of the best jobs would be migrating as computer-automated processes replaced manual ones.
Unfortunately, that idea of the future has disappeared, or at least morphed into something much different.

The glory days when IT pros could name their ticket evaporated when the Y2K crisis passed and then the dot com implosion happened. Suddenly, companies didn’t need as many coders on staff. Suddenly, there were a lot fewer startups buying servers and hiring sysadmins to run them.
Around the same time, there was also a general backlash against IT in corporate America. Many companies had been throwing nearly-endless amounts of money at IT projects in the belief that tech was the answer to all problems. Because IT had driven major productivity improvements during the 1990s, a lot of companies over-invested in IT and tried to take it too far too fast. As a result, there were a lot of very large, very expensive IT projects that crashed and burned.
When the recession of 2001 hit, these massively overbuilt IT departments were huge targets for budget cuts and many of them got hit hard. As the recession dragged out in 2002 and 2003, IT pros mostly told each other that they needed to ride out the storm and that things would bounce back. But, a strange thing happened. IT budgets remained flat year after year. The rebound never happened.
Fast forward to 2011. Most IT departments are a shadow of their former selves. They’ve drastically reduced the number of tech support professionals, or outsourced the help desk entirely. They have a lot fewer administrators running around to manage the network and the servers, or they’ve outsourced much of the data center altogether. These were the jobs that were at the center of the IT pro boom in 1999. Today, they haven’t totally disappeared, but there certainly isn’t a shortage of available workers or a high demand for those skill sets.
That’s because the IT environment has changed dramatically. More and more of traditional software has moved to the web, or at least to internal servers and served through a web browser. Many technophobic Baby Boomers have left the workforce and been replaced by Millennials who not only don’t need as much tech support, but often want to choose their own equipment and view the IT department as an obstacle to productivity. In other words, today’s users don’t need as much help as they used to. Cynical IT pros will argue this until they are blue in the face, but it’s true. Most workers have now been using technology for a decade or more and have become more proficient than they were a decade ago. Plus, the software itself has gotten better. It’s still horribly imperfect, but it’s better.
So where does that leave today’s IT professionals? Where will the IT jobs of the future be?

1. Consultants

Let’s face it, all but the largest enterprises would prefer to not to have any IT professionals on staff, or at least as few as possible. It’s nothing personal against geeks, it’s just that IT pros are expensive and when IT departments get too big and centralized they tend to become experts at saying, “No.” They block more progress than they enable. As a result, we’re going to see most of traditional IT administration and support functions outsourced to third-party consultants. This includes a wide range from huge multi-national consultancies to the one person consultancy who serves as the rented IT department for local SMBs. I’m also lumping in companies like IBM, HP, Amazon AWS, and Rackspace, who will rent out both data center capacity and IT professionals to help deploy, manage, and troubleshoot solutions. Many of the IT administrators and support professionals who currently work directly for corporations will transition to working for big vendors or consultancies in the future as companies switch to purchasing IT services on an as-needed basis in order to lower costs, get a higher level of expertise, and get 24/7/365 coverage.

2. Project managers

Most of the IT workers that survive and remain as employees in traditional companies will be project managers. They will not be part of a centralized IT department, but will be spread out in the various business units and departments. They will be business analysts who will help the company leaders and managers make good technology decisions. They will gather business requirements and communicate with stakeholders about the technology solutions they need, and will also be proactive in looking for new technologies that can transform the business. These project managers will also serve as the company’s point of contact with technology vendors and consultants. If you look closely, you can already see a lot of current IT managers morphing in this direction.

3. Developers

By far, the area where the largest number of IT jobs is going to move is into developer, programmer, and coder jobs. While IT used to be about managing and deploying hardware and software, it’s going to increasingly be about web-based applications that will be expected to work smoothly, be self-evident, and require very little training or intervention from tech support. The other piece of the pie will be mobile applications — both native apps and mobile web apps. As I wrote in my article, We’re entering the decade of the developer, the current changes in IT are “shifting more of the power in the tech industry away from those who deploy and support apps to those who build them.” This trend is already underway and it’s only going to accelerate over the next decade.

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