Thursday March 17, 2005

Plant a tree in '73 ?

In 2003 they celebrated the thirty year anniversary of the Plant a Tree in '73 idea. I think it is a shame there are not more ways of encouraging people to plant trees, through sponsoring and being aware that trees are like the lungs of this planet . It goes beyond the UK with the legal and illegal logging in areas like the rainforests.

The trouble is digging a hole and planting a tree is only the first stage. Trees need looking after in their early years. So often you see a load of trees planted and then damaged by vandals which makes me sick. Perhaps if we catch these vandals we should mutilate their body in a similar way they damaged the tree, but I remind myself we live in a civilised society..I would also like to see it where if a tree is cut down due to old age or falls down in heavy winds the government has a way of encouraging their replacement. The problem is of course with people waiting for operations and crimes to be solved this is going to be low on anyones priority list.

Remote administration or timezone based

We are really lucky being in a Global group. The big win from providing a Global lab service is if Chris requests a setup at the end of our day we can get the US lab to build it and it will be ready for him the next day. This means we do not have to work late shifts which is important as staying late when the weather is bad can be risky. The same clearly works for the other places where we have engineers that use our labs. This is called 'Follow the Sun'.

On the administration side it also means we can patch and do other admin work on systems that are in labs that are not actively being used. So we can get the US to patch or reboot our servers and the local lab users are not inconvenienced at all. The other benefit is if something goes wrong with our servers the other geos can jump on it and fix it before we get in.

The key to making this work is by using standard console software so it is easy to get to the consoles of these machines thousands of miles away, standard setups so boot disks and alternative boot devices we use with Live Upgrade all have names like mirror3 in the OBP etc. So you just let the remote guy know when you want the reboot to happen, what disk to boot from and the alternative to use if the new boot environment does not work and they do the rest.