I must begin by apologising for using the word ‘leveraged’. It’s terrible marketing-speak. However, it mostly fits in context and anyway I am using it in an ironic sense. (not that that’s even a valid excuse for the likes of me, but there you go.)

There are certain aspects of the admin trades where semi-obsessive neatness and/or attention to detail are useful things to have. It’s one of the times where not being able to leave the house without checking that you’ve turned the gas off twice and locked the front door three times can be a positive thing to admit in an interview. [NB: Self-deprecating hyperbole.]

It can also lead to the sort of unfortunate failure-modes that if you’re lucky you’re not familiar with.

(This was all kicked off by one of the network guys asking me some hard questions about the nature of packaging and dependencies, which set me off on a bit of a ramble. Thus network types get it first. Beard-fondling admins get their kicking later.)

Twice now, I’ve been in jobs where the greater part of the network has been rebuilt. If you imagine everything being lifted up while new wires are plumbed in by a selection of blokes with disturbing arsecracks, then you’d not be far wrong. Towards the end of the work, the relevant network manager has (metaphorically) straightened up, dusted off their hands and declared the task complete. And then the terrible oiks in charge of the servers have started migrating services to the shiny new bits of wire, to discover that only about a third of the routes are in place and next to none of the odd ports required to make the databases work or sodding undocumented OSX distributed p/w malarkey. Thus there’s a sudden pile of change-requests (or an aggrieved queue next to the network manager’s cube) followed by quite a lot of grousing about ‘making my nice clean network diagram all complicated with your filthy packets and honestly why are you people even using Oracle?’

Which, um, yes.

Meanwhile, there used to be one of those Rules of Thumb that became over-generalised by people who were massively missing the point on purpose. It went along the lines of ‘the process-list on your unix box should only be about a screen long, and if you don’t know what the various jobs are doing and which ports they’re using, disable them.

That’s actually sensible behaviour if you’re talking about some hateful SysV box that’s acting as a firewall or bastion host back in the old days when Solaris was a relevant OS (Pre Y2K) and everything came with inetd enabled with the tiresome daemons that no-one understood. (ticotsord? Daft name for anything that’s not a planet in a space-trading MMO.)

However, it’s only going to make everyone else hate you if you drag that attitude along into the world of Linux distros and try to out-stubborn the package-manager. Don’t do that. I know that sinking feeling when I see the resulting trail of gubbins that gets hauled in like tin cans on string following the bride & groom’s car in a Carry-on film when I type ‘apt-get install default-jre’, and I have learned to let it go.

Not letting that sort of thing go ends in something like ‘And that, your honour, is when I decided to create my own Linux distribution…’

It happens in tool-building, too. One of the things I half-promised myself was that the stomp-git daemon would never do anything careless with the repositories. All it would do is a ‘git fetch’ and anything further would be under the control of a carbon-unit. That was a splendid plan until I discovered that actually I needed the thing to keep a Puppetmaster tree in sync behind a firewall. Well, ok. That’s a special mode which requires a specific command-line option which is well documented in the config file and the initscript.

Then I needed to keep a hieradata tree in sync across two puppetmasters, and an (this!) Octopress install working, and it turned out that some rearranging of the config file made the code less worse and the ease of doing dangerous thing more better.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. It’s made several things really quite trivial, but it really doesn’t sit well with me.

Funny business, code.