Steve Kemp's Blog

Recently an ex-colleague of mine changed jobs and suggested that I write something about the pros and cons of working from home. I've thought about this subject, off and on, for a few years and frustratingly I think most of the pros and the cons are the same:

• When you work from home you're working from home.

I live in a two-bedroom flat in Edinburgh. (Having just spent thousands on a new bathroom I don't expect I'll be moving any time soon. A rough budget of £40-50,000 would let me convert my attic into two/three rooms. So there is growth potential!)

In my flat I have made one of the bedrooms an office. The office contains:

• A huge desk with two PCs, and two telephones on it.
• Several book-cases.
• A wall-mounted fan.
• Very little else.

One PC is for work. One PC is for me. One phone is for work. One phone is my own.

Every working day I switch on the work router, the work phone, the work PC around 09:30. I then work, taking a lunch-break between either 12:00-13:00 or 13:00-14:00, until 18:00 at which point I switch off the work toys.

I ignore my personal PC during the working day with the exception that it is the source of my music. I can reach across and hit the appropriate multi-media keys to select Play/Pause/Next Track/Previous Track/Volume Up/Volume Down. (When thenever the work-phone rings the first ring is ignored as I scramble to hit "Mute" or "Pause"..!)

So what are some of the advantages/drawbacks? Well I'm at home. So the environment is one that I've made myself, and enjoy. The music is mine. The colour-scheme is mine. The pictures on the walls are mine. I have a Steve-loving chair. There is no soulless air-conditioning, no horrible cubicles, and no noisy people talking.

The downside? No people talking. If I didn't leave my house at lunchtime I'd speak to zero people face to face in an average working day. That took a while for me to notice, but it is not nice.

Since I work from home "the commute" takes seconds. I tend to get out of bed and wander straight to the desk. I'll work non-stop, then get dressed around lunchtime so that I can go out for lunch. Hail, Rain, Snow, or Sunshine I leave the house for lunch every single day (unless waiting for an atypical delivery). Because if I didn't I'd have no human contact. In the afternoon if it is a nice day I'll get undressed again, because I can, so why the hell not?

Providing you're focussed working from home has several advantages that I can think of - I've no qualms about setting the washing machine going before I start work knowing that I can "spare" five minutes to empty it later in the day. Similarly I've no concern about ordering (even large) items, because I know what time the postman comes, and I know I'm never going to be out and miss a delivery.

When I first started working from home I had a laptop instead of a PC and there were mornings when I worked, lazily, from my bed, or from my sofa whilst watching TV. That didn't last for long because I just didn't do a good job. I think I got away with it in the sense that I don't think people noticed, but I expect if it had lasted for longer it would have been quickly apparent. I stopped because the line was blurring between "home life" and "work life".

Having a dedicated working area is essential in keeping me focussed. I don't do "home things" when I'm in "work time" - with very rare exceptions. Yes I wander around and pace if I'm thinking, yes I make more tea and coffee than I would in a real office, and yes I might open windows, phone a friend, read my gas meter, washup dishes, or similar as I'm "making coffee". But on the whole it only works if I work when I'm working.

I could save money by using my work-internet instead of paying for personal-internet, but keeping the two links separate is another way of being focussed. I don't do "dodgy" things on the internet, on the whole (haha), but if I do I'd want to be damn sure that that was via my link and not the work-link - and having two PCs and two network links I know that is the case. There have been times when the work link has broken and I've used my personal link + openvpn to continue working, or at the very least re-join our internal chatroom and say "Internet down, brb".

As a system administrator there are times when I have to do things either early in the morning, late at night, or even during a weekend. I guess a final advantage is that this is not a struggle - providing I don't schedule such operations at times when I'm in the pub, meeting friends, or taking pictures of cute strangers, it isn't a struggle to say "I'll do this after 8pm tonight", or set the alarm early. No long walk to an office, and if I've already got food cooking for my tea I can eat it nearby whilst still configuring things and testing sites/services/machines.

So pros: I'm in my own environment, I don't worry about receiving parcels, meter-readings, and have wonderfully pleasant music all day. Ancillory bonuses are really side-effects of being in my environment: I have my good coffee, my nice cups, I can eat food I enjoy. etc, etc.

Cons: You must be dedicated. You must be focussed lest you give in to temptation and cease working for minutes/hours at a time. You lose part of your home space - I can't turn this room into a childrens bedroom, for example.

Nothing earth-shattering. I've done this for five years now, and although I was a little skeptical initially I thought "Why not?" It has worked out well and I think if I ever did need to leave my current position I'd have no hesitation about working from home in the future.

Finally it has to be said that when I've had partners in my life they've traditionally been the type to wake up later than me. I get significant brownie points for being able to wake them up around 10/11AM with a cup of hot coffee & breakfast in bed every morning. By virtue of having a separate space I can close the door and not be disturbed by them walking around.

I'm sure I've forgotten things - but as an initial pass the benefits and disadvantages of working from home are the same: You're in your own house.

ObQuote: "Explorers in the further regions of experience." - HellRaiser

It was interesting to see Clint Adams describe love and dissatification with configuration management.

At work I've got control of 150(ish) machines which are managed via CFEngine. These machines are exclusively running Debian Lenny. In addition to these hosts we also have several machines running Solaris, OpenBSD, and various Ubuntu releases for different purposes.

Unfortunately I made a mistake when I setup the CFEngine infrastructure and when writing all the policies, files, etc, I essentially said "OK CFEngine controlled? Then it is Debian". (This has been slowly changing over time, but not very quickly.)

But in short this means that the machines running *BSD, Solaris, and non-Debian distributions haven't been managed as well via CFEngine as the rest, even though technically they could have been.

A while back I decided that it was time to deal with this situation. Looking around the various options it seemed Puppet was the way of the future and using that we could rewrite/port our policies and make sure they were both cleanly organised and made no assumptions.

So I setup a puppetmaster machine, then I installed the client on a range of client machines (openbsd, debian lenny, ubuntu, solaris) so that I could convince myself my approach was valid, and that the tool itself could do everything I wanted it to do.

Unfortunately using puppet soon became painful. It has primitives for doing various things such as maintaining local users, working with cronjobs, and similar. Unfortunately not all primitives work upon all platforms, which kinda makes me think "what's the point?". For example the puppet client running upon FreeBSD will let you add a local user, setup a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file but will not let you setup a password. (Which means you can add users who can login, but then cannot use sudo. Subpar)

At this point I've taken a step back. As I think I've mentioned before I don't actually do too much with CFEngine. Just a few jobs:

• Fetch a file from the master machine and copy into the local filesystem. (Making no changes.)
• Fetch a file from the master machine, move it to the local system after applying a simple edit. (e.g "s/##HOSTNAME##/`hostname`/g")
• Install a package.
• Purge a package.
• Setup local user accounts, with ~/.ssh handled properly.
• Apply one-line sed-style edits to files. (e.g. "s/ENABLED=no/ENABLED=yes/" /etc/default/foo)

(i.e. I don't use cron facilities, I add files to cron directories. Similarly I don't use process monitoring, instead I install the monit package and drop /etc/monit/monitrc into place.)

There is a pretty big decision to make in the future with the alternatives being:

• Look at Chef.
• Stick with CFEngine but start again with a better layout, with more care and attention to portability things.
• Replace the whole mess with in-house-fu.

If we ignore the handling of local users, and sudo setup, then the tasks that remain are almost trivial. Creating a simple parser for a "toy-language" which can let you define copies, edits, and package operations would be an afternoons work. Then add some openssl key authentication and you've got a cfengine-lite.

For the moment I'm punting the decision but I'm 90% certain that the choice is CFEngine vs. Chef vs. In-House-Fu - and that puppet is no longer under consideration.

Anyway despite having taken months to arrive at this point I'm going to continue to punt. Instead my plan is to move toward using LDAP for all user management, login stuff, and sudo management. That will be useful in its own right, and it will coincidentally mean that whatever management system we do end up using will have on less task to deal with. (Which can only be a good thing.)

ObFilm: Terminator II

It is nice when you work for a company where you can say:

"Ice-lolly break..."

The response?

"Me too!"

Tonight has been a productive evening, I guess the ice-lolly helped!

I managed to optimize the storage of rejected SPAM mail for my commercial service. That is something I've been obsessing over recently since the volume of SPAM is currently hovering around 2.5 million messages.

Still I suspect it is only a matter of weeks before I need to expand. The current setup has me using three machines:

• Primary machine runs:
  • Web Application
  • SMTP processing/filtering/delivery
• Secondary machine runs:
  • SMTP processing/filtering/delivery
• Offsite machine:
  • Runs the blog.
  • Runs the support system.
  • Runs the service status page

Ideally I'd like to split that up further so that I have a single machine running the web application (the part the user interacts with), a pair of MX machines, and the offsite machine doing the minimal work it does.

That way the incoming mail will not affect the application at all directly.

Thankfully the split should be trivial. The only hard part is finding a fast webhost that can offer me ~1Gb of RAM, ~1000Gb of disk space, and won't charge much. Ideally around £15/$30 a month. (hahaha! hahaha! ha!)

ObQuote: Léon

I've spent a few hours recently looking at building RPM packages of GNU/Linux kernels, which has been a frustrating process.

There are many many online guides which give the impression that this is actually a pretty complex process. For example How To Compile A Kernel - The CentOS Way guide. (Did I mention how bad most of the howtoforge guides are recently?)

So, after fiddling around for an afternoon and getting lost I decided to abandon the process.

Here is a tested process for building a binary RPM kernel package:

cd linux-2.6.24.7/
make rpm

Yes this works just fine upon a Centos 5.x machine - I'm used to using make-kpkg to make a Debian kernel package, but it seems that if you just visit kernel.org and download the latest version you can build a RPM without any extra effort thanks to native support. Cool.

Now I need to work out how to create, host, and update a YUM repository. That looks fiddly and annoying too. XML. Eww. Any guides are most welcome - ultimately I need to package and host a "recent" kernel for Centos 4.x, Centos 5.x and Fedora Core 6-9 - each for i386 + amd64.

ObQuote: Spiderman