Today is Tom Melendez‘s last day at work.  I remember the time before he started here pretty well.  John Palmieri, who had been working here for a few years, had just taken a position with Red Hat, so we were looking to hire someone.  I already knew Tom as I had been attending LIPHP for a while before this.  When I overheard that some guy named ‘Tom’ would be coming in for an interview I immediately began to wonder if it was Tom Melendez or not.  I was very psyched when I saw him sitting in the conference room for his interview.

Working with Tom these past few years has been a great experience and I wouldn’t have picked anyone else to work with.  I learned a lot by working with Tom.  The things that I learned weren’t limited to just technical things.  I learned more about real estate, taxes, time management, setting priorities and all kinds of general life management things from Tom.  I tried to spend a lot of spare time with him just to pick his brain and absorb as much of this stuff as possible.

It’s going to be weird at work with him not being here.  I’m pretty confident that we’re going to continue to do great work, but I’m also pretty sure that it is going to be a little less fun for a while.

I wanted to wish Tom good luck at Yahoo!, and what better place to do that than on my blog.  I’m sure he’s going to do great things with Yahoo! News and then go on to great things throughout Yahoo! and whatever company is lucky enough to have him next.  Make us proud, Tom!

Child Brutality

This past weekend Jen and I went to a party for her sister’s confirmation and her brother’s communion. We got there a little late because we were at Tom‘s going away party. We walked in and there were a few kids there that I hadn’t met before. Jen’s sister had a friend there and her brother had a friend there, who in turn had brought his little brother. Of course, all of the corresponding mothers are present as well.

Now, I started playing frisbee with the kids that are there. This was a little complicated because all three of the boys lined up on one side of the yard with just me on the other side. So, it is basically my job to make sure that no one child feels left out. I’m trying to distribute the throws evenly, but the frisbee isn’t exactly a tool of precision. Things are only made worse because the two brothers (~ age 9 and 6) are fighting every time that one of them catches the frisbee. Now I feel like I’m starting a fight between these two kids and that the mother probably hates me for getting them all riled up. Of course, I don’t really know any of these people besides Jen’s family, I’ve only been there for 5 minutes at this point.

It was then that I threw the frisbee to the 9 year-old boy, he bobbled it in front of himself for a little bit, eventually dropped it, looked up at me holding his mouth and said, “You knocked my tooth out.”. He runs past me, holding his bloody tooth, and his mother takes him in to the house to get him cleaned up. When he comes back out I ask him to smile for me and I can see what I believe to be the top half of one of his front teeth still in his mouth. Only later on did I discover that the tooth had been loose for a while and what I thought was a half of a broken tooth was in fact the new adult tooth already showing through his gums.

I was pretty scared there for a minute, but his Mom ended up thanking me for my help extracting the tooth. Apparently it had been holding on for a while.

Puppet / CFengine2 / FAI

At work I have the need to remotely manage a few hundred linux machines. I need to have the ability to pick and choose what packages are installed on those systems and what their configuration files look like. Most of the systems are going to be identical in package selection, and their configuration will be driven from a database. There will be scripts that reside on the machine which can take the settings from the database and produce the configuration files that are needed for each service. I do need the ability to control these things by grouping machines and by singling out individual machines and making changes to their installed packages, etc.

I asked in #debian if anyone knew of any such beast and someone in there recommended using FAI (Fully Automatic Install) for the initial installation of the system, and then using either puppet or cfengine2 for maintenance thereafter.

I haven’t done too much research yet, but puppet seems to be really interesting.  I’m not sure that it is going to fit our needs 100%, but it is definitely worth a lot more investigation.  It seems like a lot of these tools cater to clusters, which makes sense.  But, we have requirements that a cluster doesn’t, just as a cluster has needs that we don’t have.