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.

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?

The Trouble Ticket

When I first started a job at a recent employer, I was quickly assigned The Ticket. This ticket had been in the system since time immemorial, and had been passed around all of the administrators in the team. The comment history scrolled for pages and pages.

On the surface, it didn't really look all that bad. There was a small development company who were dissatisfied with their current revision control system and practices, and who wanted a new system put in place and some training in how to use it. They were very happy with open source solutions and they were using a revision control system old enough there were a lot of scripts to migrate from it to almost any of the newer systems.

Apart from everyone having a different opinion on which system to migrate them to, I was fairly hopeful it was going to be an interesting project, or at the very least not terribly difficult.

To start with, I brought the discussion around to the customer's current usage patterns.

'Well, one of the problems that we have is disk space on the local developer workstations. We don't want a checkout of the code on every system, so we check out the code onto a file server and then everyone edits it from there'

This sounded extremely odd to me, but I assumed naively that people had their own checkouts in their own shell accounts.

'Oh no, we share the code out on a Samba share, and everyone maps it as a drive on their workstations'

Oh no.

It turns out that the entire office were mounting the same samba share read/write all using the same username and password, and all editing the files as the same user in the revision control system. There was absolutely no ability to figure out who was editing what, and conflicts happened regularly. When they did, work would grind to a halt for hours while everyone tried to figure out a compromise. What was worse, the disk space problem that had prompted this odd solution was mostly a factor of their lack of understanding of how their revision control system worked. Not everyone needed a full checkout of the repository but they hadn't seemed to yet figure out that you didn't need to pull the whole thing.

I made my escape quickly and when I got back to the office I ignored The Ticket.

Until the next new Sysadmin started, and then I assigned it to him.

Interns

I work for a very large company that has very American style practices. Most of the time they don't affect us here in not-america, but the tradition of internship is one that my company has implemented in all of it's world-wide offices.

I rather wish they hadn't.

We've been assigned an intern to babysit in our very small, extremely busy team. We work with Linux. He's never touched Linux before. Ever. He doesn't like what he's seen of it so far. Apparently working at the command line is something that for him went out with the dinosaurs.

He doesn't seem to be particularly good with Windows either though, at least, I ended up configuring his wireless networking with him. We assumed then that he must have been a reasonable java developer as that's what he's studied. Seems not, after hearing him in conversation with a peer of mine who is an exceptionally talented developer. The Intern came off sounding, well, a little thick.

He is however bright eyed and bushy tailed and very, very keen. He seems to have really taken a shine to my colleague, who with his 13 years of industry experience probably seems like a bit of a father figure, or at least a brotherly type. Shame my colleague is about ready to strangle him - the constant barrage of 'But if you used Windows wouldn't that just work?' infuriates my colleague beyond rational behaviour.

 I see myself patiently explaining that most of these technologies do not scale very well on Windows platforms many times over.

He also seems to think that he should have more 'responsibility'. I think he sees himself as a manager, which is great. My team already has plenty of management and I fully support his wish to be a manager.

Far, far away from me.