System Administration Thermodynamics the Three Laws of Thermodynamics

Abstract

where he and his students study the theory and practice of network and system administration. He served as Program Chair of LISA '02 and was a recipient of the 2003 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for contributions to the theory of system administration. He currently serves as Secretary of the USENIX Board of Directors. ways to transform the question " Why does this fail? " into the related question " Is this fast enough? " Fellow system administrators, do you find yourself troubleshooting systems more and enjoying it less? Do you spend most of your time correcting the " same old problems " ? Are legacy systems millstones around your neck? Then, from what I can tell, you are like most system administrators. For those of you in this situation, I have a controversial message: The troubleshooting you are doing now is already obsolete. In the following, I will outline techniques for minimizing common kinds of trouble by use of virtu-alization. Most of these techniques are common knowledge, and I apologize in advance for stating the obvious. But, in my experience, many system administrators of good faith and stronger character than my own still endure these various tribulations. This article is written for them because I think they remain in the majority. No strategy I am going to suggest actually eliminates trouble. Instead, trouble is transformed into a hopefully more manageable form. Virtualization allows one to replace configuration troubleshoot-ing with performance troubleshooting. One key to understanding this transformation is to consider it as part of the " thermodynamics of system administration. " System administrators, like mechanical engineers and physicists, have to cope with conservation laws, and one thing that is conserved is trouble. We cannot eliminate trouble, but we can make choices that transform it into a perhaps more manageable (and hopefully " user-friendly ") form. Trouble is a form of entropy, and thus it is subject to the laws of thermodynamics. Ginsberg once described the three laws of thermodynamics as " One can't win, one can't break even, and one can't get out of the game. " In system administration terms, we might restate these laws as follows: There is no way to prevent trouble. There is no zero-cost way of transforming ■ ■ trouble into other forms. Trouble approaches zero only as system use ■ ■ approaches zero. The theme of this article is the second law. In system …