Tales from the Engine Shed

Calendaring is a vital resource for most companies these days with large dependencies upon the ability to see and manage the time of other users - a PA will need to be able to add entries to other calendars, all team members need to know when other team members are free without necessarily seeing what they are doing so meetings can be scheduled and individual users want to be able to grant selective access to some entries and not others.

Microsoft Exchange coupled with Outlook provides this functionality but locks you in to a desktop and server operating system and application bundle which may not be ideal for the needs of the company. For instance I manage an Linux based infrastructure with desktops running either Linux or Windows. There is no scope for an Exchange server within our network and OpenExchange is not a valid option since we use qmail for all mail servers and don’t want one tool to do every job - instead, we want applications to do one thing and do it well, selecting the right tool for each job.

So where does this leave us when it comes to calendaring? Well currently we can only provide this level of calendaring to a subset of the company - those for whom calendaring is not just important but vital to their job. These users are tied in to Outlook on Windows and calendar sharing is provided by XC Connect - for the few exceptions to the Outlook rule the only option is a manually edited calendar through a rather clunky web interface. This system works (sort of - there are several frequently recurring bugs and annoyances) but is based on proprietary formats and protocols and does not provide cross platform interoperability (there are connectors available for Evolution and Entourage but I do not have access to Entourage and have never had the Evolution extension work properly).

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When I got my new laptop (an HP Pavilion DV6262 if you are interested, and yes I am happy with it so far) it took me a while to get Ubuntu fully working on it and so for a short while I was using Windows Vista. When I got Ubuntu working it appeared that battery life was significantly shorter than under Windows Vista and although I now attribute that to the gnome power monitor being more pessimistic than that of Windows (and having a few bugs, like the most erratic estimation of remaining time I have ever seen) at the time I was looking for ways to stretch the battery life when running Linux.

A quick bit of research suggested I should try CPU frequency scaling which slows the CPU down when demand on it’s resources are lowered. This was relatively easy and didn’t appear to affect the functioning of the system much. I didn’t conduct any test and just took it for read that I was saving energy. A few weeks later and I was discussing strategies for saving energy in data centres since that is now becoming a large factor in the running costs, and hit upon the idea of using CPU frequency scaling to reduce the thirst for energy a densely populated rack has. This sat at the back of my mind for a while but never got much further.

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Now you may be wondering why the blog of a SysAdmin is called ‘Tales from the Engine Shed’ - what has IT got to do with engine sheds? The answer is simple - I see many parallels between the job of a SysAdmin and that of an Engine Driver. I’m not talking about the guy who drives steam engines around the country (though that is a pretty cool job), but the person whose job it was to keep the massive stationary engines running in mills and factories around the land. The men who fueled the Industrial Revolution.

These engines were fundamental to the economy of the time, providing the power for the machines throughout huge buildings. If this engine stopped the business was not making money and there was hell to pay. The same can be said of todays IT systems - you will struggle to find a company which has not embraced IT at some level and come to rely upon it, and if that company is large enough to have a dedicated IT team (even if it is only one person) then you can be sure they will be charged with making damn sure there is no downtime. The engine driver will spend many hours oiling the wheels and ensuring everything carries on smoothly and most of this is unseen by the end users who don’t see productive output in the form of physical items and as such assume the engine driver must spend most of his time with his feet up and a mug of tea in his hand.

Of course there are going to be differences and I am not saying that all aspects of the jobs relate to each other. There are enough similarities though for it to be a valid comparison, and that is enough for me.