Weekend roundup, 2010/01/23

First the links:

New recipes at last.

And now I’m proud to announce that this week I’ve finally managed to get two new recipes built for the Cookbook: one on installing Windows Server 2003, and one on post-setup actions normally taken once the basic install is complete. There’s nothing earth-shattering about these; they document tasks even a beginning sysadmin considers trivial. However they may be helpful to the rank newbie, and they serve as building blocks for things to come.

(In fact they are not what I set out to do at all. This week I wanted to bring you a recipe for bringing a new domain controller online, and decommissioning an old one. But as I was building VMs for that exercise, I realized the need for recipes describing the server build process.)

More importantly for me and this site, though, they create a template for how the Cookbook will often work. The recipe itself will be a captioned video which gets straight to the point and shows the exact sequence of actually doing the job. No generalizations, little or no theory discussion. And, importantly to my vision of the Cookbook: no user action, no matter how small, is skipped. No handwaves; no confusion. You see everything you need to do, to get the task done. Most steps are described in the recipe text, and each described step has a timestamp so you can immediately skip to that part of the video and see it being accomplished. We may leave little bits out of the text, but the camera won’t lie.

While these recipes skip over the dull, automated parts, they always show a realtime clock running. So you can truly see how long a task will take. And we will always list how long a task takes in the Ingredients section of the recipe.

Just as important as the recipes, are the companion discussion articles. An example is this article, which discusses each of the actions taken in the Win2003 Post-Install Actions article. Here we discuss why we made the choices we did in the recipe. We may not always be right, but we will tell you what we were thinking. Each recipe will link the discussion article.

As a sysadmin (especially a reluctant one!), you might simply want to go from here to a working server as quickly as possible. If that describes you, then the recipe alone will get you where you’re going. If you’d like more background and understanding, the discussion article is there to provide it!

The paucity of time.

One other thing: as I build these recipes, I find myself rather awe-stricken by the sheer amount of time they take. The video portion of the recipe takes at least two, and sometimes three or more, times as long as the task itself would take to perform. I need to perform at least one full run-through, to get a real sense of what to expect. Then at least one more full run-through with the screen recorder going. If that’s a perfect ‘take’, then yay, I get to move to the next step: the caption file, which describes each action taken. At this level of detail that takes at least 3-6 times as long as the final video length. And then the discussion article, which is another hour or so, minimum.

So let’s add that up, for a recipe that’s in progress right now: performing manual updates to a Win2003 server once it’s been installed.

  • Service packs and updates take about 2 hours. So with one run-through and one perfect ‘take’ (and a perfect take is rare), that’s a minimum of 4 hours – to make a 10-minute video!
  • Then another 30-60 minutes to do the timestamped captions.
  • One hour to write the discussion article.
  • Another 30 minutes to get everything uploaded, formatted, and looking good at both the ITcookbook and YouTube sites. And a backup of everything.

6 hours – for a 10 minute video and two accompanying web articles. I’m not moaning here – it’s a labor of love and I enjoy doing it. But it does instill in me a new level of respect for the people who do these kinds of things day in and day out.

It also reminds me how much thought and experience go into many of the daily actions we perform regularly and label as trivial. You rarely have a full respect your own knowledge and assumptions - until you try to teach them to someone who hasn’t yet got the same level of knowledge. It’s been a humbling experience.

More than anything, though, this experience re-teaches me that doing things well takes time. A lot more than you think it will. It’s worth it, in the end – but remember to pad those estimates if you want to deliver a quality job, folks!

I hope you all you readers think this recipe format, and the recipes and discussions themselves, are jobs done well. Please be fully (but realistically!) critical of them, and let us know where you think they need improvement. Every article on this site has a comments page for just that purpose. Help us make this a great resource!