Russell Coker wrote about Sysadmin Skills and University Degrees. I couldn’t agree more that a major deficiency in Computer Science degrees is the lack of sysadmin training. It seems like most sysadmins learned most of what they know from experience. It’s very hard to recruit young engineers (freshly out of university) for sysadmin jobs, and the job interviews are often a bit depressing. Sysadmins jobs are also not very popular with this public, probably because university curriculums fail to emphasize what’s exciting about those jobs.

However, I think I disagree rather deeply with Russell’s detailed analysis.

First, Version Control. Well, I think that it’s pretty well covered in university curriculums nowadays. From my point of view, teaching CS in Université de Lorraine (France), mostly in Licence Professionnelle Administration de Systèmes, Réseaux et Applications à base de Logiciels Libres (warning: french), a BSc degree focusing on Linux systems administration, it’s not usual to see student projects with a mandatory use of Git. And it doesn’t seem to be a major problem for students (which always surprises me). However, I wouldn’t rate Version Control as the most important thing that is required for a sysadmin. Similarly Dependencies and Backups are things that should be covered, but probably not as first class citizens.

I think that there are several pillars in the typical sysadmin knowledge.

First and foremost, sysadmins need a good understanding of the inner workings of an operating system. I sometimes feel that many Operating Systems Design courses are a bit too much focused on the “Design” side of things. Yes, it’s useful to understand the low-level mechanisms, and be able to (mentally) recreate an OS from scratch. But it’s also interesting to know how real systems are actually built, and what are the trade-off involved. I very much enjoyed reading Branden Gregg’s Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud because each chapter starts with a great overview of how things are in the real world, with a very good level of detail. Also, addressing OS design from the point of view of performance could be a way to turn those courses into something more attractive for students: many people like to measure, benchmark, optimize things, and it’s quite easy to demonstrate how different designs, or different configurations, make a big difference in terms of performance in the context of OS design. It’s possible to be a sysadmin and ignore, say, the existence of the VFS, but there’s a large class of problems that you will never be able to solve. It can be a good trade-off for a curriculum (e.g. at the BSc level) to decide to ignore most of the low-level stuff, but it’s important to be aware of it.

Students also need to learn how to design a proper infrastructure (that meets requirements in terms of scalability, availability, security, and maybe elasticity). Yes, backups are important. But monitoring is, too. As well as high availability. In order to scale, it’s important to be able to automatize stuff. Russell writes that Sysadmins need some programming skills, but that’s mostly scripting and basic debugging. Well, when you design an infrastructure, or when you use configuration management tools such as Puppet, in some sense, you are programming, and in terms of needs to abstract things, it’s actually similar to doing object-oriented programming, with similar choices (should I use that off-the-shelf puppet module, or re-develop my own? How should everything fit together?). Also, when debugging, it’s often useful to be able to dig into code, understand what the developer was trying to do, and if the expected behavior actually matches what you are seeing. It often results in spending a lot of time to create a one-line fix, and it requires very advanced programming skills. Again, it’s possible to be a sysadmin with only limited software development knowledge, but there’s a large class of things that you are unlikely to address properly.

I think that what makes sysadmins jobs both very interesting and very challenging is that they require a very wide range of knowledge. There’s often the ability to learn about new stuff (much more than in software development jobs). Of course, the difficult question is where to draw the line. What is the sysadmin knowledge that every CS graduate should have, even in curriculums not targeting sysadmin jobs? What is the sysadmin knowledge for a sysadmin BSc degree? for a sysadmin MSc degree?

I recently spent some time updating my systemd knowledge and decided to put together some slides that I’ll use for a lecture. I’m interested in feedback about things that are missing,  unclear, etc. Available on slideshare, as PDF, and as LaTeX source.

Several improvements have been made to UDD’s Bug Search and Maintainer Dashboard recently.

On the Maintainer Dashboard side, the main new feature is a QA checks table that provides an overview of results from lintian, reproducible builds, piuparts, and ci.debian.net. Check the dashboard for the Ruby team for an example. Also, thanks to Daniel Pocock, the TODO items can now be exported as iCalendar tasks.

Bugs Search now has much better JSON and YAML outputs. It’s probably a good start if you want to do some data-mining on bugs. Packages can now be selected using the same form as the Maintainer Dashboard’s one, which makes it easy to build your own personal bug list, and will suppress the need for some of the team-specific listings.

Many bugs have been fixed too. More generally, thanks to the work of Christophe Siraut, the code is much better now, with a clean separation of the data analysis logic and the rendering sides that will make future improvements easier.

As the reminder, it’s quite easy to hack on UDD (even if you are not a DD). Please report bugs, including about additional features you would like to see!

I’d like to share a few tips that were useful to strengthen my personal email organization. Most of what follows is probably not very new nor special, but hey, let’s document it anyway.

Many people have an inbox folder that just grow over time. It’s actually similar to a twitter or RSS feed (except they probably agree that they are supposed to read more of their email “feed”). When I send an email to them, it sometimes happen that they don’t notice it, if the email arrives at a bad time. Of course, as long as they don’t receive too many emails, and there aren’t too many people relying on them, it might just work. But from time to time, it’s super-painful for those interacting with them, when they miss an email and they need to be pinged again. So let’s try not to be like them. :-)

Tip #1: do Inbox Zero (or your own variant of it)

Inbox Zero is an email management methodology inspired from David Allen’s Getting Things Done book. It’s best described in this video. The idea is to turn one’s Inbox into an area that is only temporary storage, where every email will get processed at some point. Processing can mean deleting an email, archiving it, doing the action described in the email (and replying to it), etc. Put differently, it basically means implementing the Getting Things Done workflow on one’s email.

Tip #1.1: archive everything

One of the time-consuming decisions in the original GTD workflow is to decide whether something should be eliminated (deleted) or stored for reference. Given that disk space is quite cheap, it’s much easier to never decide about that, and just archive everything (by duplicating the email to an archive folder when it is received). To retrieve archived emails when needed, I then use notmuch within mutt to easily search through recent (< 2 year) archives. I use archivemail to archive older email in compressed mboxes from time to time, and grepmail to search through those mboxes when needed.

I don’t archive most Debian mailing lists though, as they are easy to fetch from master.d.o with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
rsync -vP master.debian.org:~debian/*/*$1/*$1.${2:-$(date +%Y%m)}* .

Then I can fetch a specific list archive with getlist devel 201502, or a set of archives with e.g. getlist devel 2014, or the current month with e.g. getlist devel. Note that to use grepmail on XZ-compressed archives, you need libmail-mbox-messageparser-perl version 1.5002-3 (only in unstable — I was using a locally-patched version for ages, but finally made a patch last week, which Gregor kindly uploaded).

Tip #1.2: split your inbox

(Yes, this one looks obvious but I’m always surprised at how many people don’t do that.)

Like me, you probably receive various kinds of emails:

• emails about your day job
• emails about Debian
• personal emails
• mailing lists about your day job
• mailing lists about Debian
• etc.

Splitting those into separate folders has several advantages:

• I can adjust my ‘default action’ based on the folder I am in (e.g. delete after reading for most mailing lists, as it’s archived already)
• I can adjust my level of focus depending on the folder (I might not want to pay a lot of attention to each and every email from a mailing list I am only remotely interested in; while I should definitely pay attention to each email in my ‘DPL’ folder)
• When busy, I can skip the less important folders for a few days, and still be responsive to emails sent in my more important folders

I’ve seen some people splitting their inbox into too many folders. There’s not much point in having a per-sender folder organization (unless there’s really a recurring flow of emails from a specific person), as it increases the risk of missing an email.

I use procmail to organize my email into folders. I know that there are several more modern alternatives, but I haven’t looked at them since procmail does the job for me.

Resulting organization

I use one folder for my day-job email, one for my DPL email, one for all other email directed or Cced to me. Then, I have a few folders for automated notifications of stuff. My Debian mailing list folders are auto-managed by procmail’s $MATCH:

:0:
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <.*@lists\.debian\.org>
 * ^X-Mailing-List: <debian-\/[^@]*
 .ml.debian.$MATCH/

Some other mailing lists are in they separate folders, and there’s a catch-all folder for the remaining ones. Ah, and since I use feed2imap, I have folders for the RSS/Atom feeds I follow.

I have two different commands to start mutt. One only shows a restricted number of (important) folders. The other one shows the full list of (non-empty) folders. This is a good trick to avoid spending time reading email when I am supposed to do something more important. :)

As for many people probably, my own organization is loosely based on GTD and Inbox Zero. It sometimes happen that some emails stay in my Inbox for several days or weeks, but I very rarely have more than 20 or 30 emails in one of my main inbox folders. I also do reviews of the whole content of my main inbox folders once or twice a week, to ensure that I did not miss an email that could be acted on quickly.

A last trick is that I have a special folder replies, where procmail copies emails that are replies to a mail I sent, but which do not Cc me. That’s useful to work-around Debian’s “no Cc on reply to mailing list posts” policy.

I receive email using offlineimap (over SSH to my mail server), and send it using nullmailer (through a SSH tunnel). The main advantage of offlineimap over using IMAP directly in mutt is that using IMAP to a remote server feels much more sluggish. Another advantage is that I only need SSH access to get my full email setup to work.

Tip #2: tracking sent emails

Two recurring needs I had was:

• Get an overview of emails I sent to help me write the day-to-day DPL log
• Easily see which emails got an answer, or did not (which might mean that they need a ping)

I developed a short script to address that. It scans the content of my ‘Sent’ maildir and my archive maildirs, and, for each email address I use, displays (see example output in README) the list of emails sent with this address (one email per line). It also detects if an email was replied to (“R” column after the date), and abbreviates common parts in email addresses (debian-project@lists.debian.org becomes d-project@l.d.o). It also generates a temporary maildir with symlinks to all emails, so that I can just open the maildir if needed.