From Fedora Project Wiki
Server Product WG Persona: SysAdmin MacGyver
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).