Dan Makovec’s blog

Time to play with LDAP

One of my big upcoming projects involves LDAP. Specifically, I’ll be investigating the possible use of a aystem for user authentication for Apache, account creation for Unix and Windows servers, Exchange mailboxes and corporate addressbooks, sudo user/role management, crontabs across multiple machines, VoIP PBX config and electronic badge setup, with a web interface for configuring the whole lot.

I’ve been up thinking about the best way to tie this together. Documentation on how to drive Active Directory/Exchange from LDAP is fairly thin on the ground, so I’m wondering if it’s done very much, and what features we’re cut off from by not using MS’s proprietary AD interface. Just about all of the other systems I’m looking at tying in have pretty decent docs on how to integrate with LDAP.

It’s just an evaluation at the moment. Whether it will be rolled out for real is up to the powers that be. But I’m quietly excited as I’ve been looking for an excuse to mess with LDAP for years now, and it looks like I’m finally getting my chance.

Shit. 2am. Must sleep!

So this is drowning

A bad day today. It started with the train running late and getting me into work at 9:20. By 9:35 we saw the first signs of a catestrophic server failure which, over the next few hours, resulted in enormous (by our standards) service disruptions which lasted for the next three hours. All our alerting and failover systems worked exactly as expected - the problem was that the issue that we experienced was never predicted, so by the time the systems kicked in the proverbial bodily waste was already impacting with the air projection unit.

The problem was made worse by the fact that the departments are organised in an intellectually top-heavy arrangement. That is, the front-line personnel responsible for day to day running of the systems concerned lack the problem solving skills to deal with what really amounts to a front-line problem. So instead the development team is called in to take care of what really should be a basic failover operation, without any of the staff who should have been there being present.

The problem goes back to the company’s origins in dot com mode. Procedures and lines of responsibility are still poorly defined, and consequently work is performed in and ad-hoc fashion by whomever is the fastest at solving the problem, regardless of whether the work is their responsibility or not. Consequently, knowledge doesn’t get disseminated, and we depend on the same people forever, despite the fact that they’ve moved on to other work within the company. The only time anybody learns the information (if we’re lucky) is during a handover when the old person responsible leaves the company.

One of the things I’m trying to achieve in my new role is formalisation of our procedures - including ones that should have been in place to handle today’s problem. The frustrating part is that we’re in a catch-22 of attempting to do this while continuously being interrupted by the sort of front-line problems that we’re trying to get a handle on.

Another of my frustrations is the fact that a colleague is drawing a lot of time away from essential work because they’re not coming up to speed with their own work, continually requiring more assistance than most people in their position for the amount of time that they have been there should require. I believe they’re transferring to another department this week so that at least should cease to be a problem soon.

We managed to get through our problems by the end of the day well enough, but I went home feeling wholly dissatisfied with my day.

I guess you can’t expect miracles overnight. This is going to take a while.

Twinings English Breakfast rocks!

After feeling a little flat, I popped out to the staff kitchen to make something to warm me up, and came across a bowl of Twinings English Breakfast teabags. 20 minutes later and I swear, I can’t remember popping an ecstacy pill that made me feel this good in ages!

I wonder if it was the tea, or the Krispy Kreme caramel nut crunch donut I had (somebody brought in 2 dozen for Greg’s birthday celebration in the office).

I love the world right now.

Management for dummies

Week two of my new job as Platform Development Manager, and so far so good. That’s not to say it’s been a piece of cake - far from it.

Two major projects from separate teams with high visibility at the board of directors level are due to come to completion this week. Well, that’s not true. Actually, one of them should have been finished 6 weeks ago and the other 2 weeks ago. Various bugs and delays have pushed out the timelines so that their go-live dates are now roughly coinciding with each other. Being head of the team responsible for the network architecture on which the developed projects run, it’s my job to make sure our servers are configured correctly, the appropriate firewall holes are punched and that end-to-end testing can be successfully completed so that somebody can flick the switch and declare the systems live.

The problem is that both systems are pretty complex - one of them requires 6 servers in various roles, and another involves a dedicated link to an external provider. Getting the appropriate bits and bobs working for one system at a time is hard enough. Ensuring both of them work correctly in time for the same arbitrary switch-on date is impossible.

It’s fair to say that my enthusiasm for IT in general has waned to the point where I’m no longer interested in being a “Scotty”-style miracle worker who can meet impossible deadlines, so as a substitute I have to settle for writing extensive emails to all and sundry explaining why at least one system needs to be delayed yet again.

In the meantime, I’m picking up where my predecessor, Pete, left off. I’m managing a team of four, with degrees of experience that range from excellent to “how the hell did he get this job?”. I’m still learning the art of delegation, and trying to sort out which jobs to assign to whom. Despite the fact that I’ve known the guys I’m managing for quite a while, figuring out the pace at which they work is proving harder than I originally anticipated. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to get the hang of this I think. Luckily for me, my boss is very supportive and is guiding me through the harder parts - including the half-yearly performance reviews that I’m about to conduct next week (this should be a laugh - everybody knows my opinion of performance reviews).

An interesting part of the job is managing one of the team members (who’s very good at what he does) who’s 15 years older than me. My boss’s advice has been to treat him exactly as if he’s 2 years younger than me. So far it seems to be working pretty well. Fortunately, we get on well enough on a social basis so the friction between us seems minimal at the moment.

I’ve made a couple of changes to the way we operate already. One of the things that annoys me most about modern office environments is the use of cubicles and artificially high walls between neighbouring desks which separate members on the same team, to the point where people sitting next to or opposite each other start using MSN Messenger just to talk. Given that my team all sit together, I came into the office after hours and removed the partitions between us, so that we could actually see each other while we work. It’s already started to pay dividends, with the weakest member of the team now feeling emboldened enough to ask others questions about things he doesn’t know. This makes a change from his former practice of sitting at his desk, twiddling his thumbs waiting for the boss to come around and ask him why he hadn’t done his work, and him giving some excuse about not knowing what to do.

The second no-brainer as far as I’m concerned was the introduction of a weekly meeting, away from our desks. We sit down, discuss the week that was, any upcoming events, and any problems we’re having. Given the size of the team, I’ve elected to have the meetings down at the local cafe for now over coffee and cookies. This seems to have got the guys relaxed enough to be able to talk to me about whatever’s going on. With time and with a larger team, I’ll develop this into a more formal affair, as I’ve been used to in previous companies.

Along with management comes a more complex form of time tracking than I’m used to, since I’m now not just looking after my own work. Yes, I’m actually using Excel for something other than shopping lists or share price tracking. I’m not up to the stage of using MS Project, primarily because it’s a pain in the ass and will probably cost more time to look after than I save by having a time management process. Still early days yet, but the tracking is probably going to get a lot more complex as further business priorities creep onto the list.

Finally, I had what I believe I will look back on as my final rave on Sunday night. We started at 11 and finished at 6am, and I wasn’t good for much on Monday (good thing it was a public holiday). We had a great time out, with all the familiar warm fuzzy feelings usually associated with a rave. We’ve now cleaned out all our “supplies” (which were actually sitting unused for the past 4 months or so) and don’t intend to re-stock. I think that chapter of Brian’s and my life, fun though it was, is pretty much closed. We both feel it’s time to move on - we’ve got more responsibilities now, and for one thing we’d be pretty stupid to throw away a pretty decent career on the basis of feeling like crap the first couple of days of the week due to the excesses of weekend partying. Ah well, it was a good ride. I hope the next stage of life is as much fun!