After that, I took a different approach: I kept sending the mail on the SAME server as the backup, and using IMAP I could DRAG-and-DROP the backup attachment from the mailbox on one server to the mailbox on another server (=GMail). They did not mark me as a spammer that way, of course. So that worked for a while, but then I got tired of doing this manually.
So the following ruby script is the way I automated the “move offsite” part of that backup. For completeness, I will give the due credits about who set me on the right track: I started off by this example by Ryan.
#!/usr/bin/env rubybegin_=Time.now#includesrequire'net/imap'##Source Info$SRCSERVER="mail.muscetta.com"$SRCPORT=143$SRCSSL=false$SRCUSERNAME="daniele"$SRCPASSWORD=""$SRCFOLDER="INBOX.Backups"##Destination Info$DSTSERVER="imap.gmail.com"$DSTPORT=993$DSTSSL=true$DSTUSERNAME="muscetta@gmail.com"$DSTPASSWORD=""$DSTFOLDER="Backup"#connect to sourceputs"connecting to source server #{$SRCSERVER}... nn"srcimap=Net::IMAP.new($SRCSERVER,$SRCPORT,$SRCSSL)srcimap.login($SRCUSERNAME,$SRCPASSWORD)srcimap.select($SRCFOLDER)#connect to destinationputs"connecting to destination server #{$DSTSERVER}... nn"dstimap=Net::IMAP.new($DSTSERVER,$DSTPORT,$DSTSSL)dstimap.login($DSTUSERNAME,$DSTPASSWORD)dstimap.select($DSTFOLDER)# Loop through all messages in the source folder.uids=srcimap.uid_search(['ALL'])ifuids.length>0$count=uids.lengthputs"found #{$count} messages to move... nn"srcimap.uid_fetch(uids,['ENVELOPE']).eachdo|data|mid=data.attr['ENVELOPE'].message_id# Download the full message body from the source folder.puts"reading message... #{mid}"msg=srcimap.uid_fetch(data.attr['UID'],['RFC822','FLAGS','INTERNALDATE']).first# Append the message to the destination folder, preserving flags and internal timestamp.puts"copying message #{mid} to destination..."dstimap.append($DSTFOLDER,msg.attr['RFC822'],msg.attr['FLAGS'],msg.attr['INTERNALDATE'])#delete the msgputs"deleting messsage #{mid}..."srcimap.uid_store(data.attr['UID'],'+FLAGS',[:Deleted])srcimap.expungeend#disconnectdstimap.closesrcimap.closeendtotal_time=Time.now-begin_puts"Done. RunTime: #{total_time} sec. nn"
Not having one of the “supported” platforms pushed me into playing with the provided Management Packs, and in turn I managed to use the MP for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 as a base, and replaced a couple of strings in the discoveries in order to get a working CentOS 5 Management Pack.
I still have not looked into the “hardware” monitors and health model / service model, so those are not currently monitored. But it is a start.
A lot of people have asked me a lot of information and would like to get the file – both in the blog’s comment, on the newsgroup, or via mail. I am sorry, but I cannot provide you with the file, because it has not been throughly tested and might render your systems unstable, and also because there might be licensing and copyright issues that I have not checked within Microsoft.
Keep also in mind that using CentOS as a monitored platform is NOT a SUPPORTED scenario/platform for SCX. I only used it because I did not have a Suse or Redhat handy that day, and because I wanted to understand how the Management Packs using WS-Man worked.
Actually, I still think that the best way to figure out how things are done is by looking at the actual implementation, so I encourage you to look at the management packs and figure out how those work. There are a few mature tools out there that will help you author/edit Management Packs if you don’t want to edit the XML directly: the Authoring Console, and Silect MP Studio Lite, for example. If you want to delve in the XML details, instead, then I suggest you read the Authoring Guide and peek at Steve Wilson’s AuthorMPs.com site.
Disclaimer The information in this weblog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose. THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I’VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS PROGRAM.
I am testing the beta bits of the cross-platform extensions that were released on Microsoft Connect
This post wants to describe my limited testing so far – I hope this can benefit/help everyone testing the beta for some stuff that might currently not be incredibly clear – unless you attended the MMS class, at least :-))
I started out with the White Paper that has been posted on the web, which describes the architecture pretty well, but from a higher level (with diagrams and the like). Then I downloaded the beta bits, which contain another document about setting the thing up. It is pretty well done, to be honest (especially if you consider that it is beta documentation for a beta product!), but it does not really go all the way down to troubleshooting things a lot, yet. I will try to cover some of that here.
I installed the agent manually – it’s just a RPM package, not much that can go wrong with that. There is a reason why I did not use the push discovery and deployment of the agent, which you will figure out reading later on. Once installed, I tried to figure out how things were looking like on the linux machine. It is all pretty understandable, after all, if you look around on the machine (documented or not, linux and open source stuff is easy to figure out by reading configuration files and the like, and by searching on the web).
Basically the “agent” is not properly an “agent” the way the windows agent is, since it does not really “sends” stuff to the Management Server on its own: It consists of a couple of services/daemons, based on existing opensource projects, but configured in their own folder, with their own name, and using different ports than a standard install of those, not to conflict with possible existing ones on those machines.
The Management Service uses these services remotely (similar to doing agentless monitoring towards a windows box) using these services. The two services are:
I still have to delve into them properly as I would like to, but I already figured out a bunch of interesting things by quickly looking at them.
Agent Communication someone must have decided to “recycle” the 1270 port number that was used in MOM2005 🙂 Basically openwsman listens as a SSL listener (with basic auth – connected via PAM module with the “regular” unix /etc/passwd users, so you can authenticate as those without having to define specific users for the service). So all that happens is that the Management Server asks things/executes WS-Man queries and commands on this channel. The Management Server connects every time to the agent on port 1270 using SSL, authenticates as “root” (or as the specified “Action Account”) and does its stuff, or asks the agent to do it. So the communication is happening from the Management Server to the agent… not the other way around like it happens with Windows “agents”. That’s why it feels to me more like an “agentless” thing, at least for what concerns the “direction” of traffic and who does the actual querying.
For the rest, the provided Management Packs have “normal” discoveries and “normal” monitors. Pretty much like the Windows Management Packs often discover thing by querying WMI, here they use WS-Man to run CIM queries against the Unix boxes.
The Service Model is totally cool to actually *SEE* in action, don’t you think so ?
A few more debugging/troubleshooting information:
I searched a bit and found the openwsman.org documentation and forum to be useful to figure some things out. For example I banged my head a few times before managing to actually TEST a query from windows to linux using WINRM. This document helped a lot.
Of course you have to solve some other things such as DNS resolution AND trusting the self-issued certificates that the agent uses, first. Once you have done that, you can run test queries from the Windows box towards the Unix ones by using WinRM.
For example, this is how I tested what the discovery for a Linux RedHat Computer type should be returning (I read that by opening the MP in authoring console, as one would usually do for any MP):
If you need to test the query directly *ON* the linux box (querying the CIMD instead than WSMAND), the WBEMEXEC utility is packaged with the agent (under /opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools ). It is not as easy as some windows administrators (that have used WBEMTEST or WMI Tools in the past) would hope, but not even that bad. Just to run a few queries to the CIM daemon locally it is not really interactive, so you need to create a XML file that looks like the following (basically you build the RAW request the way the CIMD accepts it):
<?xml version=”1.0″ ?>
<CIM CIMVERSION=”2.0″ DTDVERSION=”2.0″>
<MESSAGE ID=”50000″ PROTOCOLVERSION=”1.0″>
<SIMPLEREQ>
<IMETHODCALL NAME=”EnumerateInstanceNames”>
<LOCALNAMESPACEPATH>
<NAMESPACE NAME=”root”/>
<NAMESPACE NAME=”scx”/>
</LOCALNAMESPACEPATH>
<IPARAMVALUE NAME=”ClassName”>
<CLASSNAME NAME=”SCX_OperatingSystem”/>
</IPARAMVALUE>
</IMETHODCALL>
</SIMPLEREQ>
</MESSAGE>
</CIM>
Once you have made such a file, you can execute the query in the file with the tool like the following:
As you can see from here, CIMD uses HTTP already. This differs from Windows’ WMI that uses RPC/DCOM. In a way, this is much simpler to troubleshoot, and more firewall-friendly.
I have not really found an activity or debug log for any of those components, yet… but in the end they are not doing anything ON THEIR OWN, unless asked by the MS…. So the “healthservice” logic is all on the MS anyway. Errors about failed discoveries, permissions of the Action Account user, and anything else will be logged by the HealthService on the Windows machine (the Management Server) that is actually performing monitoring towards the Unix box.
It really is *just* getting the WMI and WinRM-equivalent layer on linux/Unix up and running– after that, everything is done from windows anyway!
After this common management infrastructure has been provided, 3rd parties will be facilitated in writing *just* MPs, without having to worry about the TRANSPORT of information anymore.
As you have probably noticed from the screenshots and commandlines, I don’t have a “real” Redhat Enterprise Linux or “supported” linux distribution… Therefore I started my testing using CentOS 5 (which is very similar to RHEL 5) – the agent installed fine as you can see, but I was not getting anything really “discovered” – the MP had only found a “linux computer” but was not finding any “RedHat” or “SuSe” or any other “Operating System” instances… and if you are somewhat familiar with the way Operations Manager targeting works, you would understand that monitors are targeted at object classes. If I don’t have any instance of those objects being discovered, NO MONITORING actually happens, even if the infrastructure is in place and the pieces are talking to each other:
Therefore my machine was not being monitored.
In the end, I actually even got it to work, but I had to create a new Management Pack (exporting and modifying the RHEL5 one as a base) that would actually search for different Property values and discover CentOS instead as if it were RedHat:
After importing my hacked Management Pack the machine started to be monitored. Here you can see Health Explorer in all of its glory:
Of course this is a hack I made just to have a test setup somewhat working and to familiarize myself with the SCX components. It is not guaranteed that my Management pack actually works on CentOS the way it is supposed to work and that there aren’t other – more subtle – differences between RedHat and CentOS that will make it fail. I only modified a couple of Discoveries to let it discover the “Operating System” instance… everything else should follow, but not necessarily. One difference you see already in the screenshot above is that I am not yet seeing the hardware being monitored, so my hack is already only partially working and it is definitely something that won’t be supported, so I cannot provide it here. Also, this is a beta, so I I think that the Management Packs will be re-released with following beta versions, and this change is something that would need to be re-done all over again. Also, the unsupported distribution is the reason why I installed the agent manually in the first place, as the “Discovery Wizard” would not really “agree” to go and let me install the agent remotely on an unsupported “platform!”.
The information in this weblog is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights. This weblog does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. It is solely my own personal opinion. All code samples are provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose. THIS WORK IS NOT ENDORSED AND NOT EVEN CHECKED, AUTHORIZED, SCRUTINIZED NOR APPROVED BY MY EMPLOYER, AND IT ONLY REPRESENT SOMETHING WHICH I’VE DONE IN MY FREE TIME. NO GUARANTEE WHATSOEVER IS GIVEN ON THIS. THE AUTHOR SHALL NOT BE MADE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE YOU MIGHT INCUR WHEN USING THIS INFORMATION.
It is interesting to see that a bunch of open source projects written on and for the Microsoft platform grows and grows, and also nice to see that a lot of Microsoft employees are very active and aware of the open source ecosystem, rather than being stuck with only what the company makes. Phil Haack, in a post about an interview to Brad Wilson, wisely writes:
"[…] What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It’s hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. […]"
"[…] Hey. My name is Ariel and I’m the person you thought would never work at MSFT […]".
In fact, just as I do, she is running that blog on WordPress, posting her photos on Flickr, using a RSS feed on Feedburner and in general using a bunch of things that are out there that might be seen as "competing" with what Microsoft makes. In fact, this attitude towards other products and vendors on the market is what I am mainly interested in. Should we only use flagship products? Sure, when they help us, but not necessarily. Who cares? People’s blogs are not, as someone would like them to be, a coordinated marketing effort. This is about real people, real geeks, who just want to share and communicate personal ideas and thoughts. I had a blog before being at Microsoft, after all. Obviously I had exposure to competing products. My server was running LAMP on Novell Netware in 2002 – after which I moved it to Linux. It is not a big deal. And if I try to put things in perspective, in fact, this is turning out to be an advantage. I am saying this, as the latest news about interoperability comes from MMS (Microsoft Management Summit): and that is the announcement that System Center Operations Manager will monitor Linux natively. I find this to be extremely exciting, and a step in the right direction… to say it all I am LOVING this!!! But at the same time I see some other colleagues in technical support that are worrying and being scared by this – "if we do monitor Linux and Unix, we are supposed to have at least some knowledge on those systems", they are asking. Right. We probably do. At the moment there are probably only a limited number of people that actually can do that, at least in my division. But this is because in the past they must have sacrificed their own curiosity to become "experts" in some very narrow and "specialized" thing. Here we go. On the opposite, I kept using Linux – even when other "old school" employees would call me names. All of a sudden, someone else realizes my advantage. …but a lot of geeks already understood the power of exploration, and won’t stop defining people by easy labels. Another cool quote I read the other day is what Jimmy Schementi has written in his Flickr profile:
"[…] I try to do everything, and sometimes I get lucky and get good at something […]".
Reading on his blog it looks like he also gave up on trying to write a Twitter plugin for MSNLive Messenger (or maybe he never tried, but at least I wanted to do that, instead) and wrote it for Pidgin instead. Why did he do that ? I don’t know, I suppose because it was quicker/easier – and there were API’s and code samples to start from.
The bottom line, for me, is that geeks are interested in figuring out cool things (no matter what language or technology they use) and eventually communicating them. They tend to be pioneers of technologies. They try out new stuff. Open Source development is a lot about agility and "trying out" new things. Another passage of Brad’s interview says:
"[…] That’s true–the open source projects I contribute to tend to be the “by developer, for developer” kind, although I also consume things that are less about development […] Like one tool that I’ve used forever is the GIMP graphics editor, which I love a lot".
That holds true, when you consider that a lot of these things are not really mainstream. Tools made "by developer, for developer" are usually a sort of experimental ground. Like Twitter. Every geek is talking about Twitter these days, but you can’t really say that it is mainstream. Twitter has quite a bunch of interesting aspects, though, and that’s why geeks are on it. Twitter lets me keep up-to-date quicker and better (and with a personal, conversational touch) even better than RSS feeds and blogs do. Also, there are a lot of Microsofties on Twitter. And the cool thing is that yo can really talk to everybody, at any level. Not just everybody "gets" blogs, social networks, and microblogging. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be on top of the tech news, or use experimental technologies. So in a way stuff like Twitter is "by geeks, for geeks" (not really just for developers – there’s a lot of "media" people on Twitter). Pretty much in the same way, a lot of people I work with (at direct contact, everyday) only found out about LinkedIN during this year (2008!). I joined Orkut and LinkedIN in 2004. Orkut was in private beta, back then. A lot of this stuff never becomes mainstream, some does. But it is cool to discover it when it gets born. How long did it take for Social Networking to become mainstream? So long that when it is mainstream for others, I have seen it for so long that I am even getting tired of it.
"[…] some of them we will be putting out on officelabs.com for the general public (you folks!) to try so we can understand how "normal" people would use these tools. Now of course, as we bloggers and blog-readers know, we’re not actually normal – you could even debate whether the blogosphere is more warped than the set of Microsoft employees, who comprise an interesting cross-section of job types, experiences, and cultures. But I digress. […]"
But I have been digressing, too, all along. As usual.
I usually don’t like mentioning specific facts that happened to me at work. But work is part of life, so even if this is mostly a personal blog, I cannot help myself but write about certain things that make me think when they happen.
When I end up having conversations such as this, I get really sad: I thought we had finally passed the arrogant period where we had to spoon-feed customers, and I thought we were now mature enough to consider them smart people and providing cool, empowering technologies for them to use. I also thought that pretty much everybody liked Microsoft finally opening up and actually talking TO people… not only talking them INTO buying something, something – but having real conversations.
I get sad when I find that people still don’t seem to be accepting that, and wanting back the old model, instead. Kinda weird.
The conversation goes as follows (words are not exactly those – we were speaking Italian and I sort of reconstructed the conversation – you should get the sense of it anyway):
[…]
Me: “The SDK service allows you to do quite a lot of cool stuff. Unfortunately not all of that functionality is completely or always easily exposed in the GUI. That is, for example: it is very EASY to define overrides, but it can get very tricky to find them back once set. That’s why you can use this little useful tool that the developer of that SDK service has posted on his blog…”
Cust: “…but we can’t just read blogs here and there!”
Me: “Well, I mean, then you may have to wait for the normal release cycle. It might be that those improvements will make it in to the product. That might happen in months, if you are lucky, or maybe never. What’s wrong if he publishes that on his blog, bypassing the bureaucracy crap, and makes your life easier with it RIGHT NOW?”
Cust: “It is not official, I want it in the product!”
Me: “I see, and even understand that. But right now that feature just isn’t there. But you can use this tool to have it. Don’t worry: it is not made by some random guy who wants to trojan your server! It is made by the very same developer who wrote the product itself…”
Cust: “It is not supported, what if it breaks something?”
Me: “So are all resource kit tools, in general. written by some dev guy in his free five minutes, and usually unsupported. Still very useful, though. Most of them. And they usually do work, you know that much, don’t you?”
Cust: “But I can’t follow/read all the blogs out there! I don’t have time for it”
Me: “Why not? I have thousands of feeds in my aggregator and…”
Cust: “I don’t have time and I don’t want to read them, because I pay for support, so I don’t expect this stuff to be in blogs”
Me: “Well, I see, since you pay for support, you are paying ME – in fact I am working with you on this product precisely as part of that paid support. That’s why I am here to tell you that this tool exists, in case you had not heard of it, so you actually know about it without having to read that yourself on any blog… does that sound like a deal? Where’s the issue?”
Cust: “Sgrunt. I want something official, I don’t like this blog stuff”
[…]
I thought this was particularly interesting, not because I want to make fun of this person. I do respect him and I think he just has a different point of view. But in my opinion this conversation shows (and made me think about) an aspect of that “generation gap” inside Microsoft that Hugh talks about here:
“[…]4.30 Hugh talks about a conversation he had with a few people inside Microsoft- how there’s a generation gap growing within the company, between the Old Guard, and the new generation of Microsofties, who see their company in much more open, organic terms.[…]”
Basically this tells me that the generation gap is not happening only INSIDE Microsoft: it invests our customers too. Which makes it even more difficult to talk to some of them, as we change. Traditions are hard to change.
I am seriously considering giving Asirra a try. It is an interesting project from Microsoft Research for an HIP (Human Interaction Proof) that uses info from petfinder.com to let users set apart pictures of dogs from those of cats. There is also a WordPress plugin, in the best and newest “we want to interoperate” fashion that we are finally getting at Microsoft (this has always been the way to go, IMHO, and BTW).
It’s friday night, I am quite tired and I can’t be asked of writing a long post. But I have not written much all week, not even updated my Twitter, and now I want to finish the week with at least some goodies. So this is the turn of a couple of Powershell commands/snippets/scripts that will count alerts and events generated each day: this information could help you understand the trends of events and alerts over time in a Management Group. It is nothing fancy at all, but they can still be useful to someone out there. In the past (MOM 2005) I used to gather this kind of information with SQL Queries against the operations database. But now, with Powershell, everything is exposed as objects and it is much easier to get information without really getting your hands dirty with the database 🙂
foreach ($datetime in $eventtimes){ $array += $datetime.timegenerated.date }
$array | Group-Object Date
Beware that these “queries” might take a long time to execute (especially the events one) depending on the amount of data and your retention policy.
This is of course just scratching the surface of the amount of amazing things you can do with Powershell in Operations Manager 2007. For this kind of information you might want to keep an eye on the official “System Center Operations Manager Command Shell” blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/scshell/
A while ago, talking to some friends, I was mentioning how cool it was that Flickr provides APIs, so that you can always get your data out of it, if you want to. There are several downloader applications that I found on the Internet, but I have not yet chosen one that I completey like among the few that I’ve tried. So, inspired by Kosso’s PHP script for enumerating your photos on Flickr, I thought I’d port it to Powershell and make my own version of it. Just for the fun of it. My Powershell script does not do everything that Kosso’s one does: I don’t build a web page showing description and comments. I suppose this is because the original script was made with PHP, which you usually run on a web server and outputting as HTML is the standard thing you would do in PHP. I just concentrated on the “download” thing, since mine it is a console script. You can think of mine as a “full backup” script. Full… well, at least of all your photos, if not of all the metadata. It should be trivial to extend anyway, also considering Powershell XML type accelerator really makes it extremely easy to parse the output of a REST API such as Flickr’s (I would say even easier and more readable that PHP’simplexml). There is a ton of things that could be extended/improved in the script… including supporting proxy servers, accepting more parameters for things that are now hardcoded… and with a million other things. Even this way, though, I think that the script can be useful to show a number of techniques in Powershell. Or just to download your photos 🙂 So you can download the script from here: Get-FlickrPhotos.ps1
I just created an account for myself on the site… as you know I like PowerShell, so even if I usually prefer writing stuff in english, I will try to hang out there and see how can I contribute to it.
I don’t know about other people, but I do get a lot to think when the end of the year approaches: all that I’ve done, what I have not yet done, what I would like to do, and so on… And it is a period when memories surface.
I found the two old CD-ROMs you can see in the picture. And those are memories. missioncritical software was the company that invented a lot of stuff that became Microsoft’s products: for example ADMT and Operations Manager.
The black CD contains SeNTry, the “enterprise event manager”, what later became Operations Manager. On the back of the CD, the company motto at the time: “software that works simply and simply works”. So true. I might digress on this concept, but I won’t do that right now.
I have already explained in my other blog what I do for work. Well, that was a couple of years ago anyway. Several things have changed, and we are moving towards offering services that are more measurable and professional. So, since it happens that in a certain job you need to be an “expert” and “specialize” in order to be “seen” or “noticed”. You know I don’t really believe in specialization. I have written it all over the place. But you need to make other people happy as well and let them believe what they want, so when you “specialize” they are happier. No, really, it might make a difference in your carrer 🙂
In this regard, I did also mention my “meeting again” with Operations Manager. That’s where Operations manager helped me: it let me “specialize” in systems and applications management… a field where you need to know a bit of everything anyway: infrastructure, security, logging, scripting, databases, and so on… 🙂 This way, everyone wins.
Don’t misunderstand me, this does not mean I want to know everything. One cannot possibly know everything, and the more I learn the more I believe I know nothing at all, to be honest. I don’t know everything, so please don’t ask me everything – I work with mainframes 🙂 While that can be a great excuse to avoid neighbours and relatives annoyances with their PCs though, on the serious side I still believe that any intelligent individual cannot be locked into doing a narrow thing and know only that one bit just because it is common thought that you have to act that way.
If I would stop where I have to stop I would be the standard “IT Pro”. I would be fine, sure, but I would get bored soon. I would not learn anything. But I don’t feel I am the standard “IT Pro”. In fact, funnily enough, on some other blogs out there I have been referenced as a “Dev” (find it on your own, look at their blogrolls :-)). But I am not a Dev either then… I don’t write code for work. I would love to, but I rarely actually do, other than some scripts. Anyway, I tend to escape the definition of the usual “expert” on something… mostly because I want to escape it. I don’t see myself represented by those generalization.
As Phil puts it, when asked “Are software developers – engineers or artists?”:
“[…] Don’t take this as a copout, but a little of both. I see it more as craftsmanship. Engineering relies on a lot of science. Much of it is demonstrably empirical and constrained by the laws of physics. Software is less constrained by physics as it is by the limits of the mind. […]”
Craftmanship. Not science. And stop calling me an “engineer”. I am not an engineer. I was even crap in math, in school!
Anyway, what does this all mean? In practical terms, it means that in the end, wether I want it or not, I do get considered an “expert” on MOM and OpsMgr… and that I will mostly work on those products for the next year too. But that is not bad, because, as I said, working on that product means working on many more things too. Also, I can point to different audiences: those believing in “experts” and those going beyond schemes. It also means that I will have to continue teaching a couple of scripting classes (both VBScript and PowerShell) that nobody else seems to be willing to do (because they are all *expert* in something narrow), and that I will still be hacking together my other stuff (my facebook apps, my wordpress theme and plugins, my server, etc) and even continue to have strong opinions in those other fields that I find interesting and where I am not considered an *expert* 😉
Well, I suppose I’ve been ranting enough for today…and for this year 🙂 I really want to wish everybody again a great beginning of 2008!!! What are you going to be busy with, in 2008 ?
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