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Needing to remember is a sign of mismanagement, because if you have to remember it or look it up in third-party docs you might pick a different method than you

by dkarl 8y ago

Needing to remember is a sign of mismanagement, because if you have to remember it or look it up in third-party docs you might pick a different method than you did last time and create a subtle problem that might be time-consuming to debug. If anyone recalls the old days of having a handful of expensive servers that were configured at different times, often by different people, this was a common source of inconvenience and outages. The right way is to have it automated or at least recorded, for example in his presumably version-controlled config management system. Of course this creates the pitfalls of automation, but I think it's unavoidable if you desire reliability and efficiency. Bypassing automation and typing in commands from memory or from man files, even if it's a one-off experiment with a fresh server, is going in the wrong direction to address the pitfalls of automation. If you're worried about not understanding the configuration commands your automation uses, a better way would be to call a meeting with some junior engineers (or a rubber duck) and talk through the configuration process line-by-line.

nurettin 8y ago
We are typing about converting multiple languages of expression (say, iptables rules and sshd config) into one (say, yaml or json) right? The whole point is to homogenize those languages into a single one so the configurations can be managed via a single program. (say chef, ansible) And in the process of doing this, people stop remembering the original languages and you are now stuck in config language land where you still have to look up syntax on how to do things anyway. So from your perspective, the problem is not "not remembering how" or "not knowing how" it is "not organising processes" am I getting it correct here?
- dkarl 8y ago
  > So from your perspective, the problem is not "not remembering how" or "not knowing how" it is "not organising processes" am I getting it correct here? From my perspective, he doesn't have a problem at all. I would even dispute that he doesn't know the "how." If his servers are configured via chef, then chef is the how. Going deeper and looking at the OS-specific mechanisms chef uses is necessary for debugging when the behavior doesn't seem to match the documentation, just like if you're doing it by hand, iptables is the how, and the system calls or library calls it makes are what you'd look at if you couldn't understand its behavior from the man page and other docs. In other words, you shouldn't worry if you're forgetting something because you never need to use it. When you need to use it, then you will learn it again and count it as an advantage that you did know it at some point in the past.

by dkarl 8y ago

nurettin 8y ago

We are typing about converting multiple languages of expression (say, iptables rules and sshd config) into one (say, yaml or json) right? The whole point is to homogenize those languages into a single one so the configurations can be managed via a single program. (say chef, ansible) And in the process of doing this, people stop remembering the original languages and you are now stuck in config language land where you still have to look up syntax on how to do things anyway. So from your perspective, the problem is not "not remembering how" or "not knowing how" it is "not organising processes" am I getting it correct here?

dkarl 8y ago
> So from your perspective, the problem is not "not remembering how" or "not knowing how" it is "not organising processes" am I getting it correct here? From my perspective, he doesn't have a problem at all. I would even dispute that he doesn't know the "how." If his servers are configured via chef, then chef is the how. Going deeper and looking at the OS-specific mechanisms chef uses is necessary for debugging when the behavior doesn't seem to match the documentation, just like if you're doing it by hand, iptables is the how, and the system calls or library calls it makes are what you'd look at if you couldn't understand its behavior from the man page and other docs. In other words, you shouldn't worry if you're forgetting something because you never need to use it. When you need to use it, then you will learn it again and count it as an advantage that you did know it at some point in the past.