SysAdmin's Journey

Sorry for the reposting on the RSS feed, I was migrating to a new server, upgrading to Drupal 7, and getting Varnish setup.  Things seem to be running well now.  This blog is not dead -- stay tuned for some new content.

I've been running a single node from VPS.net for about a year now.  Please note that my specific experience has been in their "Chicago Zone D data center", but if you check out their status page or search Twitter, you'll find a lot of others having the same issues.  While there's a lot of good things to write about, where they fail is the most important area to me: availabilty.

There's only a certain amount of bandwidth in a person's day.

Heroku has been around for awhile now, but has been primarily a rails host.  Well, until recently anway.  With the announcement of their Facebook integration, many others have noted that *any* PHP app can at least parse on Heroku's cedar stack.  I'll be honest, it took me longer to get ruby+rails setup on my Macbook than it did to get a proof-of-concept installation of Drupal up and running.  Here's what I did:

At one of my jobs, we recently went through the process of selecting a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for our site. While the first rule of CDN's is that "any CDN is better than no CDN", it can be argued that certain CDN's are a better fit in certain situation than others. This post is basically a summary of the process we went through when selecting our CDN.

There's a blog post to follow with when/why, etc., but without further ado:

I'm moving to a new position at Buckle, and that means we need a new Lead SysAdmin.  It's a great job at a great company, in a great place to raise a family (Kearney, NE).  You get paid well, get a good yearly budget for new toys equipment, and it's overall a very fun position.

Sorry for the lack of posts as of late -- a massive upgrade operation at $DAYJOB has had me out of commission for a few weeks. Also, I've had the great fortune to be able to be part of a migration to Drupal which exposed me to migrate and friends. Yes, I said "great fortune" in the same sentence with "migration" without using a negative - that's just how awesome this module is.

My first impression when looking at the documentation for migrate was that it didn't seem complete. While it's true that the documentation could be better (what module couldn't use better documentation?), the problem is that no two migrations are alike.  Because of this, the best documentation is not going to be written by the module authors, it will be written by the module users - they are the ones that come up with the recipies to fill the cookbook.  There are several good reasons why there aren't many recipes available:

• Developers don't like doing migrations.  It can be painful, and often takes quite a bit of time.
• Users don't like migrations.  They see a migration of data as something easily done, and they often get sticker shock when presented with estimates for a large migration.
• Migration code is written in a flurry before the site is active.  Right before launch, development crescendos, and then is often never used again (because no two migrations are the same).

This being my first migration, I vowed that I would document my experience, because I learned so much from it.  In this particular migration, we had to migrate a huge XML file into about 2,200 nodes in 3 content types.  Read on for my contribution to the cookbook!

I had the great pleasure of attending my first DrupalCon this week.  Held in downtown San Francisco at the Moscone Center, it was my opinion that this was Drupal's "homecoming".  While Drupal wasn't "born" in San Francisco, it seems to be the city that has the strongest following.  The attendance numbers didn't lie - I'm pretty sure they broke 3,000 geeks attendees.  I made this trip solo -- I only knew three people that were going, and those three were only acquaintances I'd met via email/IM a few months before.  When I left, I didn't come home with "leads" or "contacts", I came home with friends and role models, many of whom I plan on staying in touch with.  I met most of the authors of the Drupal books I've read, associated faces to the podcasts and RSS feeds I subscribe to, and I even had the opportunity to quickly say thanks to Dries and shake his hand.

For those who didn't know, archive.org has made the sessions available for download, so be sure to check those out.  Read on for my "takeaways" from DCSF2010.

If you would have told me 5 years ago that:

1. Sun would be gone
2. I would take personal time off from work to attend DrupalCon (and not regret it)
3. I would attend a Microsoft party

I would have told you where to shove it. Well:

For all those wondering, I went to the party as a saboteur on a mission: to drink as much as I could to try and directly impact their bottom line. Mission accomplished :)

Good times @ DCSF2010!

It snuck up on me so fast, I forgot to ask - are any of my SysAdmin's Journey readers going to San Franciso for DrupalCon? If so, contact me, and we'll see if we can meet up for a beer! I'm posting this from DIA, so if you happen to be here and want to grab a bite to eat, ping me. I'm flying out to SF at about 12:30pm MDT.