Tag Archives: sysadmin

Beware of SysAdmins in Pajamas

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I slept in a bit yesterday morning, after being up late on Friday to help facilitate application patching on some work machines.

On awakening, I make a trip to the coffee maker for a mug of hot caffeinated jumpstart. In mid-staircase, I heard the ring of the stinking on-call pager. Cuppa’ joe in hand, I plop myself down in the tbbs headquarters Captain’s chair, and call the indicated number. One of the application folks had a runaway application1, and wanted me to stop the recalcitrant process. A scripted kill -9 later, and I’m enjoying my coffee, with a promise I’ll stand by in case they have any further problems. They restarted their app, their life was good, and the lady I was talking to thanked me profusely, and said “Thanks, baby doll.”
Suppose she knew I was still in my bedclothes while I was helping her out?

-k-

1 Imagine that

NASCAR Flu Day

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Tomorrow, after the rainout of today’s race. The green flag drops tomorrow at noon. But I’ll have to Tivo it. I need to pick up the stinking on-call pager from the poor sap systems administration professional who currently has the duty, and soldier on. This is the worst part of a SysAdmin’s job.

-k-

SysAdmin Day Dining

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Last evening, SWMBO, Dave, his wife, James, their mom and her husband, and I had a magnificent meal and a large schooner of some fine micro brew at the Liberty Steakhouse and Brewery, which is in the Broadway at the Beach section (I guess that’s the right term) of Myrtle Beach.

After dinner we walked around the boardwalk, fed the fish from a bridge over the water, stopped for a cone at Ben & Jerry’s, and generally enjoyed all the touristy splashiness. I had a ball; it was a cross between the midway at a state fair and the souvenir trailers at a NASCAR event. Being amongst good people you haven’t seen in a while was the best part, though.

Today, we have a portion of the day to do more touristy stuff, before the birthday celebration begins later this afternoon. Right now, I’m torn between visiting the historic section of Conway, which I’ve seen and read about on Dave’s blog, or heading to a ginormous outlet mall just down the road a piece. I suppose one could say there are outlet malls everywhere, but man this one is a monster.

Whatever we do, we’re gonna have a bunch of fun.

-k-

The Code of the SysAdmin

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I’ve been pushing buttons, clicking mice, and typing in arcane crap from command lines for a good many years now. And today carried on that tradition. I was on my way to the bank to deposit some checks 1, with a trip to my franchise haircut place planned for afterwards. A ring of the cellphone derailed the tonsorial plans, as an admin buddy of mine found himself in undeserved distress from system users.

He needed some help; no problem, I’ll be home when I’m done at the bank. The haircut can wait.

Some of our filesystems had gone out to lunch due to failure of external systems which we don’t manage.

First step was to assess the damage. I logged in from home, my buddy was ensconced in his shabby cubicle at work, and we did the evaluation of the problem. No smoking gun. Damn. So, iff’en you cant fix it, you monitor the problem.

Over the next few hours, we crafted a simple-minded little script to watch our stuff, put that script in cron, and wired it up to the Tivoli monitors we already use. Tested it, and by damn, it catches the problem, without solving same.

This is what sysadmins do:

  1. Help a brother out.
  2. Stay until the job is done.
  3. Proceed one step at a time.
  4. Drink celebratory beers.
  5. Be thankful, that at least for this weekend, they aren’t on call.

Not a lot of work-specific stuff, but admins help each other out. That’s rule #1.

-k-

1 I’m old school enough that I don’t make ATM deposits of paper checks.