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

Friday 5pm

It's 5pm on Friday. You are a few hours out from a massive migration of data between SANs. The planning for this has been rough, but it is starting to look sane.

That is until you discover right then that no-one has mentioned before the size of the disks you'll be getting from the new SAN is different to the old one.

It's not like that would be an important detail.

This is Friday 5pm for sysadmins.

Gah!

No, I cannot burn your 50GB of data to 'a DVD'. Even if my regulation issue company brick had a blueray disk burner, I'd still have to get the data back to it through may layers of VPN and NAT that at some points only manages to pass data at slow internet speeds. This is just a silly idea, honestly. Buy a real backup solution.

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.