Friends, Romans, Countrymen, The subject line is not for the whole email message. Personally, I’d rather the subject be blank and the message be a one-liner than the one-liner be in the subject. Abide my wishes, or die. Sincerely yours, …Bob
“Hey Bob, how do I get PHP to connect to Oracle?” Dude, it’s called Google. I’m a sysadmin, not development support. Oh, wait, yeah, I am development support. But not like that. Geez, get a damn book or something. “I have a chunk of code I can give you as an example if you want.” Trying. hard. to. be. nice. because. you. are. a. knob. and. I. am. busy. “Oh, I have code that has worked in the past. It just doesn’t work now. I think you’re missing the Oracle part on those new virtual machines.” Why didn’t you just say that to begin with, dick? Cut to the chase. “You’re right. Those don’t have the Oracle stuff built in …
Storage virtualization engines suck. Sure, they make it easy to move your data around. They also add cache, which helps a bit. While they’re doing this they also add another point of failure on your SAN, another potential performance bottleneck, another system to learn how to use. They’re clumsy, they’re feature-poor, and I think they have a real long way to go. I’d think about them more positively if they did a few things for me: 1) Automate array-level failover. Take IBM’s Storage Virtualization Controller, for example. It can mirror your data to another array, but if the primary array dies your hosts will lose their storage. You then have to go into the SVC and promote the second copy …
Dear Charter, I enjoyed the data service outage tonight. I was only present for seven hours of it, but those seven hours were a blast. I got to play a thousand games of Hangaroo, watch eighty reruns of CSI, do laundry, clean my kitchen, and reread a Harry Potter novel. A banner night for me. I absolutely have to build a development box for home. That way when I schedule time to work on a project, like tonight, and your service is out, like tonight, I can work on something productive. Not that cleaning my kitchen wasn’t productive, but I’m kinda overstating it. I just loaded the dishwasher and killed a fly. I look forward to the daily mini-outages that …
“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” That phrase is the mantra of the lazy, indifferent, or ignorant. The next person that tells me that is going to get a full-length Microchannel token ring card shoved up their ass. Just because it isn’t broken doesn’t mean that it is running properly. Just because it’s running at all doesn’t mean it was done properly. You saying it’s fine doesn’t mean that it actually is. Especially when all you did was fumble through the install and then declare it working. The way I see it, all hardware and software is broken. At all times.
I was thinking about my post about print Nazis and I thought “boy, printing is a real easy way to screw with people.” What other ways have I seen technology configured to make people’s lives more miserable, and sysadmins busier, all unnecessarily? It’s easy to say that these are caused by management, but in fact it’s caused by the users not speaking up. If you are a user and don’t like something you should say something. It’s more than likely that the people who are doing this to you haven’t even thought about it. Then again, sometimes they have. 1) Labyrinthian print queues with fascist permissions: if you print something by mistake there is no chance you’ll ever be able …
I’m trying to find a new phone. My LG VX6000 is getting old. It’s interesting that everybody has picked up on the AP article about how cell phones are too complex, etc. etc. I’ve been saying that for a while. The guys over at 37signals have said it, too. All I need is a phone. I don’t want a camera. I don’t want an MP3 player. Like, what is it with companies making everything a damn MP3 player? Like the Garmin GPS units they’re advertising now. I don’t want to listen to MP3s on my GPS. Seriously. Anyhow, I digress. What I need is a good phone. It needs to have: a very usable phone directory. excellent reception — a …
“Hey, do you have a second to look at this thing I wrote?” No. Not really. A “second” is at least 15 minutes by the time I get back to what I was doing. I do respect that people want to use me as a sounding board so I make time. Besides, I’m sitting here waiting for a data conversion between PostgreSQL and Oracle to fail, just watching it. “What is it?” “It’s a system to graph the performance of our servers.” “Um, we have one of those already.” “Yeah, this one is cool, though.” “Oh, what does it do differently that’s nicer?” “It polls every 10 seconds.” “It’s really interesting seeing graphs of performance that aren’t averaged over five …
Why is it that when I get a good account rep they leave after 3 months, but the crappy ones stay forever? ARGGGGHGHGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH
“I need to add NICs to the monitoring machines,” he says. I always loathe greetings like this, because the customer is telling me how to do things and not what they want to do. “Tell me what to order. What do you want to support?” Well, that’s 50% better. Asking me what I want to support is a good start. Especially on these machines. The “monitoring” machines are fifteen machines scattered all over the region to monitor network links. Our network engineers use them to diagnose problems, and when they are idle they send traffic back and forth between each other to monitor link speeds and throughput. We don’t have terminal servers or KVM-over-IP out there, so changes to these …
