System Administration isn't doomed, but it's going to to be hella different real soon

Let's compare and contrast these two articles:

• http://www.vmunix.com/mark/blog/archives/2008/10/17/cloud-computing-is-a-sea-change-how-sysadmins-can-prepare/
• http://news.oreilly.com/2008/08/luke-kanies-wants-to-modernize.html

My personal opinion is that cloud computing isn't going to take over the enterprise any time real soon. Most companies don't want their data floating on someone else's machines. And in terms of context and locality, it doesn't make sense to have a "print server in the cloud" much less a file share (and yes, there will always be file shares).

I do thing that the concept and arcitecture of "cloud computing" is going to change the I.T. industry and the profession of system administration a whole lot though. My particular vision goes something like:

• Various {system,application,database,network} administration roles will blend more. In a cloud, it's much harder to build walls between hardware, network, applications, and "other stuff" because they all depend on each other. To a degree, this has already begun: witness SOA.
  
• Scale will start to bite these fines folks. The tools will get better as a direct result.
  
• Day to day "I.T. Guy" tasks will be automated/documented/made easy enough for them to be pushed down to the users, or at least desktop/helpdesk staff. "I.T. Guy" either moves laterally to another career, or refocuses as desktop/helpdesk or upper level administration.
• 
  

Fedora 12: Usage review

With Fedora 13 Alphas being released it seems like as good a time as any to plonk down some of my thoughts on Fedora 12.

• Gnome Shell preview is really awesome.  I like it, it works, and I'm excited to see what else might be in store.  Hopefully a few keyboard shortcuts for flipping desktops.
• NetworkManager continues to make the user networking experience good.  At this point it's about as reliable and useful as my Mac.
• Video/Media codec support still sucks.  This is not Fedora's fault, it sucks on Mac too.  Codecs just plain suck.  Point in case?  I installed mythfrontend during a demo at MilwaukeeLUG and it broke Totem's ability to play an Ogg file.  After a few logouts and some more installs is started to work.  Then broke again.  Folks, this is why Flash video is successful.  HTML5 video may standardize on a few codecs but I'm not terribly sure that will help.  This has been a problem for close to a decade and I'm sometimes shocked it's still an issue. 
• Firefox is still slower than Firefox on my Mac.
• For the most part, things just work.

A big thinks to the Fedora developers and community for making great stuff.

Install Fest at Milwaukee LUG!

Advance warning that the Milwaukee Area LUG is having an Install Fest on Sept. 13th. More info can be found in the wiki. I'm going to try to be there with my laptop and a copy of liveusb-creator to make some USB Fedora keys for folks who want them as well as lend a hand.

If I have extra time, I'll try to setup DHCP on my laptop to run as an option server to present PXE'able images for various installers. This will require a bunch of downloading across my poor little cable-modem to get said images, so that might not happen, unless of course I travel to $hq and can co-opt their link.

If you're in Milwaukee, drop by and say "Hi" or bring a machine to install Linux on!