Luke A. Kanies

Biography

Luke A. Kanies is an independent consultant and researcher specializing in Unix automation and configuration management. He provides consulting and training through Reductive.

Articles

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Distributed Cfengine
Publish Date: May. 13, 2004Automation is the most important skill an administrator can develop. Cfengine is great at automation and even supports distributed automation. Luke A. Kanies demonstrates how to distribute Cfengine rules to multiple machines. Introducing Cfengine
Publish Date: Apr. 15, 2004Automation is the most important skill an administrator can develop. Learning tools that make automation easier usually pay off greatly. Luke A. Kanies claims that Cfengine may be the most important tool in your toolbox and introduces its use and design. Automating Network Administration, Part One
Publish Date: Dec. 20, 2001Any task that is carried out by a system administrator more than once is a candidate for being automated. Luke A. Kanies explains how important automation and planning are to a sysadmin. Getting Started with LDAP
Publish Date: Nov. 8, 2001Luke A. Kanies shows you how to set up a basic LDAP directory to store Unix user accounts, along with a script to pull those accounts to a Unix system. Proper Filesystem Layout
Publish Date: Oct. 11, 2001How you partition your filesystem in Unix can be a very important decision, ultimately affecting the performance of your server. Luke A. Kanies gives some practical advice on where and when to separate your filesystems. An Introduction to LDAP
Publish Date: Aug. 16, 2001Luke A. Kanies introduces LDAP and explains why it is an important tool for network administrators.

Blog

What Sysadmins Can Learn From Developers

February 25 2007

LinuxPlanet published an interview with Ibrahim Haddad this past summer on a topic near and dear to my heart. Developers have done a great job in the last couple of decades of evolving their practice, so that development looks very different now than it did a couple of years ago. There’s… read more

Better tools make us more powerful

February 25 2007

Kathy Sierra has another great article up, wondering whether better tools make us dumber (e.g., does the use of calculators mean we don’t need to learn math). The article brought to mind a lot of the fear I see among sysadmins when I discuss tools like Puppet. Sysadmins aren’t so… read more

Fallout from the Evolution post

February 15 2007

There has been quite a bit of fall-out over my post on the lack of evolution in system administration. Most of it’s about what I expected — “right on!”, I should have been more rigourous, there was too much hyperbole, I’m wrong, I’m insane — but it was still interesting… read more

OpsWare has apparently patented configuration management

February 13 2007

I only found out about this because someone noted that the patent is being challenged, but it looks like OpsWare is even more egregiously closed than I thought. Here’s the summary of the patent: The patent — number 7,124,289 — covers the cornerstone of Opsware’s technology, the ability to automate… read more

Sysadmin Models

February 08 2007

My post on the fact that I don’t think system administration is evolving seems to have ticked some people off on the lopsa-discuss list. Sure, I was a bit flippant in my post, but I think many of the critics are falling into the common trap of thinking that tools vary… read more

Why Isn't System Administration Evolving?

February 07 2007

Now that I’ve gotten the introduction out of the way, I can get to the meat of why I’m blogging here in the first place. This is a long one, but I think you’ll find it’s worth it. I’m not writing Puppet because I think I’m right or whatever; I’m writing… read more

Introduction

February 05 2007

Hullo. This is my first post on the O’Reilly sysadmin blog, and I’m about four months late. I told Mike Loukides I’d start blogging in November, and I’m just now getting around to it. It’s true that I run my own blog, but that’s mostly about the development of Puppet,… read more