Warning signs

Things you do not want to see in official installation documentation:

"Enabling FTP as root"

"Enabling telnet as root"

The flashing lights that sets off can be seen from space.

Are we there yet?

Minion is tasked with decommissioning a server. I tell them to check with various people that they understand the server will be destructively wiped as part of this. Minion asks those people if it's okay. Reply back is that confirmation will be forthcoming soon.

Minion then asks me if we can proceed.

I would have thought that was pretty obvious.

Meltdown

It's been quite a long time since I've posted anything. I just didn't seem to have any energy to do so after the brain meltdown of my job caused me to revert mentally to two years of age and start to loudly demand biscuits and my stuffed elephant. You'll be glad to hear that I'm better now. I have medication. The very patient staff at the asylum have even managed to teach me to read and write again.

I also have a new job, much to the disgust of Roy who I left behind at the old employer cleaning up after me.

In the interview for the new position, they seemed a little vague on what my duties would actually be. This didn't unduly concern me given that my interview was informal to say the least. A pair of technicians were interviewing me and seemed a little hazy on what they were supposed to ask. I probably though should have paid a little more attention at the time to the only other member of the team I was to be joining. He looked as though he hadn't slept in a month.

On my first day, I was introduced to The System. It seems I hadn't really been hired to be a UNIX Systems Administrator in any sense of the word I understood. I had been hired to look after The System.

The System is a sprawling catacomb of home-built perl that acts as a tool to perform monitoring, configuration management, customer relationship management, documentation, change control, trouble ticketing and making toast. It has a PHP front-end that I'm told only works for the simplest of tasks – anything even vaguely complicated and I'll need to write SQL to poke my commands straight into the database.

It seems the parent company have been trying in vain to get my department to replace The System with an off-the-shelf product for years, but that my department believe The System is a far better solution. 'This way' the architect beamed, 'we can just make it do anything we want instead of being forced into someone else's idea of management!'

I was supposed to have my first training session in using The System yesterday afternoon – unfortunately my mentor was called away abruptly. It seems The System has had a bit of a hiccup ... for about six months ... and hasn't been monitoring some systems it should have been. My mentor, who actually seems like quite a nice guy, informed me wryly that this has happened before.

Afternoon of day two, and I'm still sitting here sipping chilled water and flicking through engadget waiting for that first lesson. I can't wait.

Packaging

How to obtain a package:

1. Minion locates upstream site with package
2. Minion wget's it
3. Minion replicates it out to your various package repositories
4. Minion says it's done
5. Your installation fails
6. You discover minion failed to get the URL correct, and instead has replicated out a copy of a 404 page called the package.
7. Smack minion. Bad minion. No biscuit.

Choices

Your VM host is out of space. You can't add more disk to it, as the chassis is full. There's no SAN.

You have two choices:
(a) use a spare VM host of a similar spec and migrate some machines to it
(b) break the RAID-1 on the exsting host, and run it with no disk redundancy

If you chose (a), you're wrong. The obvious answer is (b).

Right?

Networking is hard

You have a new VM to build. It has three IP addresses on the same network. Naturally, you set up the name of the machine in the DNS with one of them, and have suitable application names for the others. Maybe you CNAME things as well. And you'll need a virtual NIC too.

That's why you do this:

# host myvmname
myvmname.domain has address 10.10.1.20
myvmname.domain has address 10.10.1.22
myvmname.domain has address 10.10.1.21

And why you don't provide any other names.

And why you give the VM three virtual NICs, one for each IP address. All of them on the same network.

Networking is hard.

Requirements. You don't has them.

User: Can you copy thisapplog to othermachine please?
Me: Where do I find thisapplog at the moment?
User: I don't understand
Me: What machine is thisapplog on?
User: I don't know
Me: ...

Resisting the urge to put a "copy" of the log file containing nothing but:
[Wed 16 Jul 2008 04:43:56] error: you fail at specifying logs