From Fedora Project Wiki

Server Product WG Persona: SysAdmin MacGyver

Dan Mossor

Senior Systems Engineer; IT Services Company

"We're a small organization and we have limited resources... we just can't order new hardware for every new service request we get."


Profile SysAdmin MacGyver
Age Early 40's
Location San Antonio, TX, USA
Technical Level Master
Years Experience 23
Primary Tools Webmin, FreeIPA console, oVirt Engine, home-grown bash scripts and ssh.
Referrals Fedora mailing lists, User Forums, IRC, Twitter, Google+


Motivation

  • Keep IT team on a shoe-string budget.
  • Minimize support calls.
  • Make it "Just Work" - you know, like Apple®.
  • Move away from the burdens of maintaining a Microsoft Windows network and all of it's security implications.

Goals

  • Clean, secure, and manageable deployment of multiple server applications to a small virtual farm.
  • Unified management of server resources.
  • Ability to understand resource usage across server inventory to identify underutilized resources.
  • Ability to easily deploy apps to underutilized resources.

Frustrations

  • Home-grown scripts for deploying apps that have been around forever that have mysterious voodoo power. Difficult to reproduce application deployments consistently.
  • Proliferation of various management console interfaces to have to manage.
  • Documentation, where available, isn't written for the end users/deployers of the applications.
  • Lack of an adequate IT budget for a remote office in the 21st century.

Work Description

  • Weekly meetings to address the current status of engineering projects.
  • Daily meetings to discuss budgetary concerns, and brainstorm ideas to minimize costs wherever possible.
  • Daily research into new tools available in the FOSS arena
    • Even more daily research into how to use those tools.
  • Deploying tools and technologies to test, and then roll out for general use.
  • Planning outages for the transition to new technologies and hardware (when we can afford it).