Eschew Obfuscation

It’s been quite some time since I first ran across Giving good report but from time to time, I come back to it just to keep myself in check.

If you’ve never read the paper, you should. [0] It’s by a gentleman whom I’ve never met named Richard Threadgill.

Basically, it is a plea to all technical workers to keep management informed about what they’re doing. For many of you, this may seem a simple concept but I’m pretty sure all of you know someone that is being described by this paper.

I’m lucky enough to have a boss that has been amongst sysadmins for a very (VERY [1]) long time and understands the oddities common in our profession. He’s good at extracting the information if someone isn’t good at giving it.

[0] Yeah. I just should on you
[1] I’m talking Multics old.

written by halfdime

My wife has started blogging recently (actually, before I did) and has been spending quite a bit of time on making her blog nice.

Tonight, she asked me if I would like to blog on her blog as well as this one.

One caveat though:

“You have to blog in English.”

As an explanation, she went on to speak of my lack of speaking in English when I’m talking about what I do.

Interestingly enough, I’m struggling to come up with what I think is valuable content for this blog. I can only imagine the drivel that would arrive on my wife’s lovely new space if I have to provide non-technical content.

Wish me luck!

written by halfdime

I’m getting around to reading my google reader.

Of course I’m behind. Shut up!

So I see this one Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog: Give it Back and quickly recognize it as an April fool’s joke. The best part of the read is the last paragraph and one of the reader comments (no, it’s not me).

The reader posts this horror from the past as his response to Schwartz.

written by halfdime

Tonight I was approached at the end of the day by two folks I’ve been working with quite a bit lately.

They had a fairly urgent request and wanted to make sure that it was handled tonight.

Nothing unusual, right. Our users are constantly in need of some unplanned, “my crotch is on fire” item.

To me, the notable item in the exchange was that the two of them felt it was important enough to get this done that they would come down to our offices to make the request and address any concerns.

I think it’s very important for sysadmins to be approachable. Yes, we say no often, but how we do it can be as important as that we do it. Specifically, in this instance, the two were ready for no but knew that asking would give them an honest assessment at worst and a yes at best.

They were very pleased to get their yes. The fact that they felt that they could talk to me (and my group) is, to me, the major win here.

You see, whether my users like me personally or not, I want them to trust me. I want them to seek my counsel even when they know it may not be what they want to hear.

written by halfdime \\ tags: j

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/032708-netkid.html

written by meh.

It’s really weird the things I think about while in the shower. This is the result.

Very often when people ask me what I do for a living, they’re confused by the term system administrator. They ask what that means. My responses vary wildly but often I just tell them, “I say no. A lot.”

I wonder if Gene Roddenberry had been a sysadmin if we would have the following:

Sysadmin, the pedantic career.
These are the rantings of your IT Professional.
His continuing mission: To deny your requests.
To seek out new insults and voodoo incantations.
To boldly say no to every request you have.

Don’t get me wrong, a healthy dose of skepticism and the ability to see flaws in logic is really important. I think we sysadmins often take this too far. We ravenously seek opportunities to show our abilities by correcting even the smallest mistakes. We thrive on telling someone that they’re wrong. This makes us seem a pretty negative lot.

Why is that? Don’t we have things to be happy about? How much energy do we waste daily in the pursuit of being right?

Increasingly, we’re told to be customer focussed.

Saying “no” is bad. Instead of, “I’m sorry Dave. I can’t do that.” We’re supposed to say something like, “I’m sorry Dave. I think we can synergize better if we coalesce our asset stream in a more holistic manner.”

There’s not a single pairing of ‘n’ followed by ‘o’ in that sentence. It must be better, right?

I worry about the impact that the negativity has on us as a community and in our personal relationships. We focus on what’s wrong or what could possibly go wrong in any situation. That’s constructive to a point but only if followed up by healthy changes. Perpetually saying, “That’s really broken but I’m not going to fix it” is dysfunction 101.

Going with the, fix me first, principle, I think I’m going to try to be more positive in my daily interactions.

I think I smile more than just about anyone else I know already. Perhaps I am a fool. Easily amused by the simple things in life. Regardless, I hope that smile can lift someone else from the dumps for a second at least.

Maybe I can say no in a non-threatening way that doesn’t involve a 5:1 ratio of buzz words to other words and makes me feel like a car salesman.

Maybe I’ll let it slide when someone makes a mistake and not be aggressively pedantic.

Maybe someone else will too.

written by halfdime \\ tags: j

This was copied from the vim website, so all copyrights{lefts} are theirs and theirs alone.

written by meh. \\ tags: vi, vim, vim assistant

It is by will alone I set myself a-jitter
It is by the chemical caffeine that thoughts acquire speed,
the hands acquire jitters.
The lips lose all tact.
It is by will alone I set myself a-jitter.

Caffeine among geeks is very highly regarded. Even those that do not or
cannot consume it understand the benefits and hazards. Being a frequent
flier of the caffeinated skies, I have a pretty good tolerance for the
stuff.

Tonight however is a tale of caffeinated hazards.

I have been having some difficulty getting good quality sleep and
thought that I would try to help myself out by going without caffeine
for awhile.

Can’t hurt, right?

Wrong.

My family went out to dinner tonight and I had 3, yes Alice, THREE Dr.
Peppers with my meal. Why? Because it was yummy. I’d been without for
awhile and was having a smashing romp with my family. At dinner, we
decided to run to Fry’s to pick up some Three Stooges videos to watch
with the kids later.

Fry’s is remarkably busy near close on Fridays. I’m talking 50 people
in line five minutes after the doors close busy.

Getting to the caffeine, I know of at least two things that evaded the
tact filter due to the caffeine:

“Hannah, that man doesn’t want you crawling in his butt.”
“Sure. I’ll do the bump with you.”

Both were said with zeal in my not so petite voice.

In response to the first, a large emo guy carrying an HP printer almost
ran his buddy over trying to get away. For the second, we were awarded
extra space front and back in line.

I love caffeine. I should remember to keep my consumption within 20mg
day to day or things apparently get dodgy. Although I can enjoy this
side effect, the general public seems unwilling to handle it well.

I mean, if a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm, five people trying to
give extra space to a jittery geek is probably going to cause global
warming to accelerate or the earth’s poles to change.

On the up side, it’s 11PM and I’m up to 4 blinks a minute!!

written by halfdime

Today I learned a valuable lesson about the /tmp directory. Now in the afternoon halfdime asked me if I could create a vol on one of our filers of about 100GB, and I’m like sure no problem. So I go abouts creating the slice, adding it to the exports file, and creating the fstab entry (which I slightly screwed up), but honestly that wasn’t the problem. I for some reason known to only myself and god (if you swing that way) decided to test whether I could mount the dir on the /tmp directory. Now I usually know better than to do something like that, though I know we all make noobish mistakes, that was pretty high on the list of n00bish mistakes I have made. It was funny watching my linux system die a slow death of not being able to write anything to the /tmp directory (this is where my screwing up the fstab comes into play), so I wonder if I had set the permissions correctly would my data meant for /tmp have been written to the filer? (I am going to guess yes, but there is still a lot of magic I don’t understand about some of the underpinnings of the *nix OS). So my advice the newb, noob, and n00b systems administrators out there, don’t mount remote filesystems on the /tmp dir.

Ok, so here’s the caveat, we all know and understand the being a system administrator is an interrupt driven job, and I was going to mount then umount the dir on the tmp (I still don’t know why I choose tmp and not mnt, but whatever), but I got distracted.

written by meh. \\ tags: /etc, /tmp, exports, filers, fstab, linux, n00b, netapp, newb, newbish, noob, OS, sysadmin, systems administrator

Ok,

Let me start by saying I understand that vendor meetings are part of our jobs as system adminsitrators, to have the competitive edge and all that (I know there are a myriad and plethora of other reasons, I am claiming laziness on writing them all down). But I also wonder how in the heck we are supposed to get anything done with so many meetings within a day. After one of our senior people left all of the storage stuff fell on our collective shoulders, not that we weren’t busy to begin with as there are only 3 of us who handle all of the data/backups/filers etc.  Now I have traditionally handled the backups and for me this is a great new learning experience, as I get to deal with our netapp filers (I am always up for learning experiences).  But to be honest we have some *needy* customers and there just isn’t enough time in a day to get things done as it is, let alone with vendor meetings.

Now mind you I like meeting with some vendors better than others (I happen to really like our EMC reps, as well as the Netapp peeps), but taking 3 hours our of my day doesn’t help me with getting done what I need to get done.  Some would mention that I need to read Limoncelli’s book, and while that may be correct, there are also things that I cannot simply do at home (hardware, etc).  Don’t get me wrong, I spend a good portion of my night working, as anyone that has been a sysadmin will tell you, the job never stops, and I love it (sometimes it bothers my wife, but she is uber understanding.  I just happen to think that someone should write a vendor course in how to deliver tech information to techies in a short condensed version so that we can get the information we need and go, and let management deal with the sales bs.  Just my humble opinion though, so take of it what you will.

written by meh. \\ tags: backups, emc, filers, limoncelli, meetings, netapp, networker, storage, system administrators, time management, time sink, vendors