2013-06-21 I've been in Hannover this week. There, I've met several in- teresting people and discussed on a lot of topics. There's Bernhard. He's the second one of this ultimately pragmat- ic type of programmer I've met. (The first one was Guido Lorenz, in Argentina.) Neither of them actually is a programmer, but both of them think like (good) programmers. They can see the places where automation is rewarding. As they aren't normal programmers, they more or less do ``duct-tape programming''. The merely assem- ble code snippets they've found on the internet and combine them on the basis of their own knowledge. From a computer scientist's view, the results are scaring, some times. They might use a Spreadsheet as an input form because it can store data to a data- base. But this does not matter. The create valuable prototypes that ease their daily life. The just do it. They are truly prag- matic. I believe a computer scientist can never be equally prag- matic -- we care too much about elegance or engineering. I very much admire Bernhard and Guido, to a great extend because I'll never be able to reach this truly pragmatic approach to IT. I'm doing IT because of computers, not because of the daily work. And then there's Olaf. He's a system administrator and knows what he's doing. His daily life is full of IT, here and there. But there aren't simply funny gadgets everywhere, no, it's a sane in- tegration of IT to solve real-life issues. It's an example of how you do it well. He's the one who brought be to the NAS idea. I've mused on file storage, its problems and the Plan 9 approach some time ago. A NAS appears to provide a quite good solution. It could be set up as such: o Install a NAS with enough disk space and RAID. Replace the disks or the whole NAS every few, say five, years. (Use 24/7-suitable disks!) This way, the disk storage should be quite save concerning hardware failures. The NAS is the only file storage in the home network (apart from notebooks). o Run all the clients diskless. Use network boot (PXE) direct- ly from the NAS. Add a small root file system for each of the clients. Mount the rest of the file system (home, data, usr?) from there too. o Implement a sane backup concept within the NAS with periodi- cally offline backups to external hard drives and some dis- tant location. Provide a read-only online access to the la- test backups (cf. fossil). This way, all the persistent data is in one place. You only need to care about that one. Using high-quality and new hardware there will minimize some risks. Clients are generic. You only need to setup network boot and add a root filesystem image for the client. This way, you can add processing power and peripheral devices to the network. You can use fan-less hardware to have noise-less systems. You can easily backup their whole systems be- cause they reside on the NAS. The NAS is the single node you need to care about. All the rest of the network can be replaced by generic components. You simply don't need to care. This sounds much like the Plan 9 approach, which is good. Yet, this is all theoretic and I think it'll take some time until I can realize the idea. However, it is promising. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke