we’re carrying out a short survey for ASP.NET developers and SysAdmins, and we’d love to learn more about you, and gain some insight into your experiences deploying and managing ASP.NET applications on IIS. The survey only takes 5 minutes and, in exchange for your time, there’s a prize draw to win a $50 Amazon voucher. If you’re interested, we’ll also enrol you in our Early Access Program for a sneak preview of some exciting new features for ASP.NET development and management coming up in our tools.

The survey’s intended to gather data on your experience of hosting applications, add-ins, and extensions with IIS. We’ve tested it, and found it actually takes less than five minutes to complete. Red Gate will use the results to improve its tools for everyone working with ASP.NET over the coming year. Your details won’t be shared with any other organization, or used to sell or market to you – we absolutely guarantee this –  and the prize draw will be made on September 5th.

We’ll read all responses carefully, and offer you the chance to take part in future research and usability sessions if you’d like to be involved – your input will help us make simple tools, to make life with IIS easier. So, if you’ve got 5 minutes to spare, then please do take the survey.

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Make no mistake, we SysAdmins can make some silly assumptions about HA and its impact on our lives. Let’s take a look at some and see if we can clear them up:

1. High availability will not inherently make your job more secure. That responsibility is, as it always has been and always will be, largely up to you personally. As was pointed out when I discussed 7 reasons why High Availability will help you fail in even more spectacular ways than ever, you are afforded some amazing ways to fail if you view high availability solutions as a panacea. HA is simply one of the many tools that are used to secure a resource. Remember, a carpenter isn’t paid because he has an awesome hammer.
2. High availability will not make you a better SysAdmin. Don’t kid yourself. If you didn’t have a cluster last week but you do this week, you’re not inherently a better SysAdmin. Or if you are, it wasn’t the cluster that did it. Anyone with a room temperature IQ and a support contract can implement most HA solutions, but you need good processes regardless of whether or not you have an unstoppable juggernaut of a failover cluster. SysAdmins with expensive new clustering software are not magically given excellent time management skills, interpersonal tact, clairvoyant troubleshooting insights and minty fresh breath. That takes intentionality, hard work, perseverance and humility. Just like everything else worth earning.
3. High availability will not save the company any money. HA costs money, and a lot of it. The only time it (hopefully) saves anything is in the case of a disaster, which really isn’t true savings. Yes, it prevents the active loss of money should a worst case scenario happen, but that’s not true financial savings. Thus, you shouldn’t present it to your superiors (or even yourself, for that matter) as a cost-saver. Present it like it really is: A butt saver.
4. High availability will not help you with your bad attitude. If you’re bitter that management doesn’t give you what you want or need, and makes you hobble along on a shoe-string budget, then I’m afraid there’s only one thing that will help you: getting a better attitude. And there’s only one person that can give you a better attitude: you. Don’t think that you’d be less grumpy, happier or generally live a halcyon lifestyle if you could just get some HA implemented on your critical systems. You’ll still be grumpy, unhappy and agitated, just with one more expensive system which you’re expected to maintain. Figure yourself out, and don’t expect anyone or anything to magically make you a more contented person.
5. High availability will not make your bosses appreciate you more. Or if they do appreciate you more, it’s not so much the HA system’s magic as your communication with them while you implemented it. If you want appreciation, or you fear that IT’s role is not understood and largely ignored, then it’s once again your responsibility to show up, step up and speak up. Take responsibility for what you can do to change the perception of IT. Clearly communicate what you are doing. Be visible with the business leaders and align yourself with business goals. HA will not garner you appreciation; visibility will. Unless your work practices are unsightly, in which case you have a completely different set of problems to take care of.
6. High availability does not allow you to skimp on hardware or run your equipment into the ground. As the saying goes, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. If you have two thrift-store servers that you synchronize in a cluster, do you know what you end up with? A really grotesque looking handbag that will probably get you in trouble with PETA. Skimping on hardware, or treating existing hardware poorly, and then looking to some kind of clustering solution to stave off the Bad Things from happening is not addressing the root of the problem. Buy the proper hardware and then run it in proper operating conditions before you even think about some form of clustering.
7. Lastly, High Availability will not make your stuff highly available. You will make your stuff highly available. You are the one who should be researching compatibility, scenario testing, questioning assumptions and generally being a complete pain in your vendor’s tender spots as you kick the virtual tires on a HA product. Just because the salesman (whose teeth are so white you get radiation burns from his smile) says his product implements high availability doesn’t mean it will do so automagically. If you want proof, then remind me to tell you about the time my team learned that a certain load balancer would fail in a “closed” state, thus not flowing traffic to the secondary load balancer that it was connected to. Ultimately, it’s you and your team of technologists that makes anything highly available, and don’t you forget it.

Clustering, failover, mirroring, duplication, synchronization… they all solve fewer problems than most of us think they do. Sure, those things serve a great purpose and so HA (if you’ll forgive me for using a nebulous term) can deliver some useful tools! However, let’s put high availability in a proper perspective and to do that, we might need to first see ourselves in the proper perspective. Once we free ourselves from misperceptions, we can be free to approach things with greater clarity.

It really highlighted to me why I like software development so much, because I get to be mostly freed from those laws. If I want the seats in my abstract airplane cabin to be able to move around in 3 dimensions, why that’s not a problem. I can even have them pass through each other like a poorly programmed video game. That’s not to say that the software version of my jetliner is of any real value, but at least I can “break” all of those pesky laws all I want if it makes sense to do so.

The real world just isn’t so flexible, unfortunately. System administrators have to deal with the friction between the physical and electronic worlds even more than us software developers. Computers and users are real, tangible things for the system administrator while they are more abstract concepts for a developer. Now, a good developer will do as much as possible to treat the people as real in order to more fully create software to meet their needs, but unless the software is in-house then there is a disconnect between flesh-and-blood users and their abstract counterparts.

This friction between cyber and meat space requires a delicate balance for the typical system administrator. Server rooms require refrigeration, keyboards break, and users make angry voices on the other end of the phone. But at the same time shared folders can be on in another city, login scripts can be easily duplicated, and password policies can be exceedingly simple or complex. The best administrators are those who can find and keep this balance working, and one reason that software developers don’t necessarily make the best system administrators and vice versa. Understanding the differences will help you to know where you will be the happiest.

People outside the industry don’t really understand the subtle but important differences between various computer specialities. Especially relatives looking for help installing camera software they got for Christmas, for them a computer expert is a computer expert. There are administrators who love the hardware, those who love building scripts and automating things, and those who love working directly with people. Finding what speciality you like and then following it can be a very rewarding experience. It may seem really easy to identify what it is about your chosen profession that you really enjoy, but sometimes it’s not so obvious. Take some time and really think about what it is you love about what you do. Once you do, you’ll be able to see what kind of balance you need to strike, and what changes you need to make to achieve it.

This article was posted by Adam Ruth on the The SysAdmin Network. Join The SysAdmin Network and connect with like minded individuals: http://www.sysadmin-network.com/ 

1. The Ultimate Boot CD: With a name like that, how can you go wrong? The Ultimate Boot CD (or UBCD as its known) has over 100 tools packed onto it, including many vendors’ hard drive tools, like Seagate’s SeaTools and GateWay’s GWSCAN. The disc doesn’t win any awards for a beautiful user interface, but that’s entirely beside the point. With just a few clicks on the keyboard you can delete data, recover data, test your CPU and memory and so much more. There’s even AVIRA’s AntiVir Rescue System on it. Which brings me to my next point…
2. Anti-virus scanner: For a while, it seemed as if the open source ClamAV was the only game in town as far as anti-virus boot discs were concerned. However major A/V vendors got their collective acts together, and now most of them, such as Kaskpersky and Avira to pick two examples,offer their own branded boot disc for free. The catch (of course there’s a catch) is that you need to read the EULA, because some could disallow their usage in a business environment without purchasing the commercial product.
3. Security / Hacking Tool: Sometimes you just need to go all ZeroCool and crash & burn a few things. Okay, that movie was lame, and I repent for referencing it. Moving along, the need for a choice suite of security tools is very important for most administrators. I don’t think you can do much better than back|track, as virtually every conceivable security tool you could ever want is included in this distribution. From VOIP / Telephony analysis (SIPcrack, Smap, etc.), Digital Forensics (Autopsy, Magicrescue, Vinetto, etc.), Reverse Engineering (Hexdump, GDB GNU Debugger, console and server, etc.) and network security (including wireless, wired and bluetooth tools). Did I mention almost 50  tools just under the category “privilege escalation”? Vulnerability Identification including Fuzzer, OpenSSL-Scanner and Absinthe? I could go on and on and on. Get this tool. You will lose many nights tinkering with it.
4. Trinity Rescue Kit: In this world of IT, stuff happens. And by “stuff” I mean “career limiting events”. Actually, this point doesn’t have to be restricted to your career; it can include personal incidents as well. According to the official website, “Trinity Rescue Kit, or TRK, is a free live Linux distribution that aims specifically at recovery and repair operations on Windows machines”. You can reset Windows passwords, perform virus scans (which is a recurring theme among many live CDs), wipe temporary data, undelete files, recover lost partitions and more. It even support setting up an SSH / SAMBA server to access across the network. Needless to say, if you find that your bacon has been saved as a result of TRK, please donate to the project.
5. Knoppix: Ah, Knoppix. As a result of this long-time Live CD quite a population of netizens have test driven Linux that might otherwise have passed it by. Quite a sample of that population were Windows admins. First started in the year 2000, Knoppix remains updated and relevant, and with it you can do many of the things offered by the other Live CDs listed above. Take a look at the Knoppix package list by going to any Knoppix mirror and searching for either packages.txt or packages-dvd.txt. Knoppix offers a great way to learn about Linux, or have a perfectly functioning instance quickly up and running with a plethora of useful and versatile packages. If I could only have one Live CD with me at all times, it would be (and is) Knoppix.
6. CloneZilla Live: CloneZilla is a FOSS project that has several branches. One of them is the server edition, which helps to image many machines simultaneously (which I would not recommend; instead use FOG). Another is CloneZilla Live, which is a boot disc to be used on individual machines. You can save a disk image, restore an image, and perform a disk to disk clone. It’s a great way to make quick, image-based backups of PCs as you work on them.
7. Windows PE: This tool used to be restricted to Microsoft customers that held enterprise licenses. Now it is released free of charge as part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). It can be used to recover passwords (anyone remember ERD Commander? Yeah, this is it’s up-to-date manifestation) and perform various troubleshooting and recovery tasks. If you deal with a Windows environment, you should probably keep this handy.
8. Firewall Disc: Strange things happen… and sometimes you may need to use a PC as an impromptu firewall. Or even a longer term solution is needed. In either case, you can use one of several great bootable firewall CDs such as m0n0wall, pfSense (a fork from the m0n0wall project), or even a firewall that can fit on a single floppy disk, aptly named floppyfw . Configurations can be saved to removable media. Make sure to read the documentation first.
9. Wireless Hotspot: This one might seem a little farfetched, but just think for a minute; no matter where you go, people want a wireless network. If you had a hotspot CD always at hand, you could potentially set up a safe, simple wireless network in no time using old hardware. The catch is that the best of the hotspot live CDs are not free. However, one in particular, Public IP, is on the inexpensive side. You could even turn it into a side-business for yourself if you were sufficiently business-minded…
10. 10. Dedicated Forensics: Many of these live CDs have forensics tools on them, but it could be handy to keep a tool around that is actually dedicated to computer forensics. One of the best CDs that I’ve found for this is Helix, but the various editions of Helix are not free. Take a good look at what Helix offers to see if you can justify the price, but if you can’t afford it, look at Ubuntu Rescue Remix instead, which was named as one of the “Ten Essential Linux Admin Tools” by Linux Magazine.
11. DBAN: Yes, this is an eleventh and yes, it’s a bit redundant. I am incapable of speaking of boot discs without mentioned DBAN. The name alone incurs +10 cool points; “Darik’s Boot And Nuke”. Other boot disks mentioned above have data destruction tools, and the Ultimate Boot Disc even includes DBAN, but there is nothing quite as satisfying as having a disc dedicated to a tool that has the word “nuke” in it. Plus, at 10MB, you can easily burn it to a business card sized disc. It will wipe your hard drive down to clean, shiny metal. It’s awesome, it’s ruthless and it has the word “nuke” in it. SysAdmins rejoice!

Keep in mind when looking at these “CDs” that they’re merely ISO files, and could just as easily be put onto a USB drive as a disc. Some of the boot discs, such as the Trinity Rescue Kit, can even be booted from a PXE NIC. Imagine that for one glorious moment. Someone’s Windows machine is hosed, you tell them to calm down while you reboot the PC and netboot from a PXE server. Within minutes of troubleshooting, without having to leave the user’s office, all is well. Such is the life of the well prepared SysAdmin. Think of these discs like little antacid tablets, stopping disaster-borne stomach ulcers before they start.

If you’re an IT professional who works for a school, school district, or educational organization, you may be interested in a conference this April in Pennsylvania.

IU 13 in Lancaster, PA, is hosting Tech Talk Live on April 26-27, 2011. While there are other conferences for professionals interested in using technology in the classroom, this is the only conference that serves IT professionals who work in educational environments. The content is directed toward directors of technology services, systems and network administrators, application developers, and IT support staff.

Breakout sessions delve into the nitty-gritty of deploying and maintaining information technology systems in K-12 institutions. Greg Schwem, a standup comedian who pokes fun at corporate and institutional cultures, is giving the keynote, to bring levity to the intense two-day event.

Early Registration is $250 through the end of February, and includes entry to win a free Apple iPad.

For more information on this conference or to register, visit the Tech Talk Live website, http://techtalklive.iu13.org.

You can stick documents you are currently working on in the “To-Do” section, fun stuff in the “Sweets” section and shortcuts to your network in the “Cables” section. But this is just some ideas, how you organise things is entirely up to you! Please click on the image below to see a larger version and to download the image in the resolution that fits best with your screen(s).

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1. Velcro straps and twist ties. No administrator should have to know the difference between a square knot and a granny knot while tying back a loose cascade of sundry cabling. There’s also a disturbing tendency for cable plants to turn into cable jungles and eventually Sentient Cable Beings that want to om nom nom you. Resist the urge to use plastic zip ties, because yhey are made of pure evil (in most scenarios, anyway). Velcro straps, on the other hand, are convenient, durable and made of condensed awesome. Twist-ties are only made of distilled niftiness, but are still a good choice if that’s all you have. If you choose to use twist-ties, make sure you get a sample first, because some have a rather poor paper wrapper that will easily slough off and leave you with an annoying-to-manage, pokey piece of metal. Plastic / rubber wrapped twist-ties are the best.
2. Cable Crimpers and 8P8C connectors. Yes, I said “8P8C” again, and not “RJ-45″. I demand another high-five. This should go without saying, but you will need to fix, resize and make cables from scratch. A good pair of crimpers have never been further than a few feet away from me for quite a few years now, but make sure to keep a good supply of 8P8C ends around. Also, a card describing 568A and 568B wiring specifications is also helpful. Unless you can recall the wiring specifications from memory, in which case I despise  you. I can barely remember 568b, and then only because of a deranged mental picture I’ve conjured up involving a river, a valley, the sun, the earth and bubbles. I wish I was joking.
3. Punchdown/impact tool. The tool we love to hate. Yes, you need to have one with you. No, you will not like it. Make sure to get a quality punchdown tool; no $1.99 electronic store special will do – Greenlee or Fluke tools won’t let you down. Just make sure you keep a stock of both 110 and 66 block blades with you, as it’s no fun staring at a 66 block with a 110 blade in your impact tool.
4. Fishtape. Sounds a bit overkill? Perhaps. But having a compact roll of fishtape lying around will make you feel like a hero when it’s necessary. If you deal with networks, then you naturally deal with cables. If you deal with cables, you will invariably need to run new ones. As a side note: please do not let electricians near your network cabling. Ever.



5. A Fox and Hound. No, I’m not suggesting keeping a copy of the Disney classic movie in your backpack. I’m talking about a good old fashioned cable tester. You will especially need one of these if you didn’t heed my warning in the last point, and decided to let electricians run your cable. Always carry extra batteries with you for these things (But then you would have known to do that if you had read my previous post, “10 Things That Should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 1“)
6. Cable Toner and Probe. Invaluable in tracking down mislabeled cabling (see my article on “The Fine Art of Documenting With Labels” for some inspiration on how to approach labeling). Ah, the fond memories that come flooding back when I hear the unmistakable shriek of a cable toner as I jab the probe into a bundle of unmarked cables with the circumference of a Lebanon cedar. Oh yes, and you will most definitely need a toner if your cabling was installed by electricians.
7. Assorted Patch Cables. Sounds like an obvious one, right? In a way it is. However, make sure that you choose patch cables in unholy colors if your patching is intended to be temporary or so that you can tell who’s been pilfering from your sack of goodies. A test network I helped design used bright pink cables to ward off potential cable snatchers; it worked beautifully. Seeing DayGlo colors in a switch rack will either remind you that you need to implement the final cable design, or alert you to sticky-fingered coworkers. Oh, and make sure to carry a wide assortment of lengths. I kept 1 footers as well as a few rolls of 50 footers. Come to think of it, at that length is it really a “patch” cable?
8. Keystone Jacks. Even peskier than 8P8C connectors, it’s still nice to have a handful of these nearby. Decide if you want tool-less or punchdown jacks. While you’re installing these, you can instruct the electrician in proper keystone installation while he’s trying to figure out what that little white string is for inside of a Cat 5 shield.
9. Wireless Analyzer. Nothing says “fun” like warwalking through the office (or neighborhood, or mall, or industrial park… wait, forget that last one). Keeping tabs of wireless network activity is a must for any technology worker that has 802.11 frequencies within his realm of influence . Having the proper tools to monitor rogue access points and unauthorized access attempts to official networks can help make your job a whole lot easier. Bonus points if the analyzer tool can blast rogue devices off the airwaves. As an example, AirMagnet makes a handled wireless analyzer. No word yet on whether it can help you destroy rogue AP’s with the power of your mind.
10. Cable Strippers. Not just any cable strippers. Good cable strippers. The cable stripping blade that you typically find on a pair of crimpers requires you to take three Ritalin pills and be a 6th-Dan in Kendo before you can successfully remove the sheath without damaging the copper wires inside. I prefer a tool that is dedicated to cable stripping.

There you have it! Ten things which, if you keep them in your backpack, will make you an EPIC SysAdmin / NetAdmin. With any luck, you’ll be better able to keep the network stable and available, which is very important if you’re going to keep your Team Fortress 2 server up and running… err, I mean, if you’re going to keep your corporate wiki accessible.

After 4 episodes, could there possibly be any more that you could carry with you? I hear they make backpacks that attach to the front of your body so you can carry two with you. You may need one…

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