Record and Reverie » SysAdmin

I finally Quit

Graham Booker — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 02:12:24 +0000

Well, it has been a long time since I posted here. The reason is not lack of things to say, but in fact the opposite. Much has been going on, but so much of it is in an unresolved state, I don’t want to say anything here about it (since this is open to the public). I can say that I finally quite as the sysadmin. I told my advisor that that it was effective immediately. He didn’t try to stop me, but also there really is nothing he can do about it. I didn’t sign a contract, and I am not paid. The real question in my mind is why do it?

Anyway, I hope to talk about the other things once I have them resolved. This was only the first piece to fall into place. Hopefully others will quickly, so I can get back into the occasional open source work, like yesterday.

On a side note, I went to a friend’s defense. She passed, so I guess I need to start calling her Dr.

New Semester

Graham Booker — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 04:47:51 +0000

Well, the semester is now into its third week and things are going alright. I just had my first week of teaching lab, and things pretty much went as expected. The problem is that the students are expected to do some assembly within lab, but non of them have seen x86 assembly in class yet. Essentially, I had the fun of teaching them the basics of assembly just so they could do the lab.

CIS continued to call me about my issues with VPN. I can’t be the only one with problems. It seems the issues with DNS have been fixed with the change over to their new DNS servers, but I haven’t tested it enough to make sure. I think they are more concerned with my other issue that my password is rejected when using the wireless version of VPN. I managed to get it to work once, and so now it is in a state where I will gripe should I get it to fail again.

I told my adviser that I didn’t want to be the sysadmin in the future and he said that they will work on finding someone else to do it. Truthfully, the main reason I don’t want to do it is the fact that they can’t seem to pay me for it any longer. It isn’t really fun, and without the pay, I just don’t feel like doing it. In a way I feel sorry for the next guy who gets stuck with doing this. Oh well.

Anyway, I suppose that I will try to post here more often. I have been slacking on it as of late both out of the fact that I have been busy and nothing really exciting has happened. Maybe the next few days will yield something of interest.

Power Outage Aftermath

Graham Booker — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 05:13:36 +0000

Well, for those not in the area, the power went out last night. I had decided to meet some a friend and his wife for dinner last night at McAlister’s. I arrived there when the power was flickering. The power went out while they were still on the way.

The problem for them: Many of the traffic lights don’t work when the power is out. To make matters worse, when the power was flickering, the lights would commonly shift from green to flashing red, causing many wrecks.

Anyway, we were at McAlister’s, and they couldn’t serve food. Nathan called his dad, who lives out past Snook, and asked if they had power. He did, so we decided to drive out to Summerville to go eat. We found this nice steak place that served huge portions. I had to take half of it home, and I was hungry when we got there.

This morning, I found out that the power was back on. The stupid apartment complex’s network was out (as usual) and so I went to campus really early. When I got there, I found out that the server hadn’t fully booted because of the same stupid udevd problem it has always had. So a quick reboot later, and it was fine. Then I noticed that Mug Website was also down, so I made a quick trip over there. I almost felt guilty turning it on since the building’s AC was not working, but it is still up so I guess they got it fixed.

The remainder of the day was spent talking with various people about all the issues with the power outage. At least nothing major seemed to happen, but still not something I want to relive. At least it is all over now.

Stupid Dell

Graham Booker — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 23:54:04 +0000

I swear, the more I deal with them, the more I hate dealing with Dell. Apple, on the other hand, becomes more pleasant the more I deal with them.

Last night, one of our Dell servers stopped working in many ways. I noticed most of the failures were “Input/Output Error”. A quick google search revealed that this is likely a bad HD. Well that is not Dell’s fault, but it is very unlikely for such a thing to happen when the system is new, and using hardware RAID-1 (mirroring). So, I get to the office and try to figure out what the deal is. Dell’s built in RAID controller (PERC 5i IIRC) decided to turn itself off. A quick reboot fixed it, but still, this should not have happened in an enterprise level system.

This was hot on the heals of a screwup on Dell’s part. We ordered 6 rack mounted computers, but only recieved 4. Turns out that their automated system rejected two of them as duplicates, even though they had a different purchase order, different quote number, different comments, and in one case, a different price. Good thing we gave up and called them because they would have never shipped it. At least they were kind enough to set the date to the original order date so we could actually buy the thing.

Oh well, last Friday the three MacBooks arrived. Maybe this will be the start of using Macs in the future

Paid now

Graham Booker — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 13:24:36 +0000

Well, the CE department decided that they were going to pay me now for my sysadmin work. So, that means that I will continue doing it. It is not too much work, but more than is worth doing for free.

Anyway, I am going to have the fun tonight of moving the user’s files over to the new hard drive space. Hopefully all will go well.

Stuck doing jobs

Graham Booker — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 16:19:33 +0000

People keep giving me tasks to do. I really wish they would find someone to replace me quickly. Today I kept trudging along in the task of ordering an Xserve Raid for the server. Whenever we get the thing, we will have 3TB of storage space. What makes this a pain is the fact that it is over $5000, so it has to go out for bid. Yuck. Right now I have to wait on email replies before I can go much further.

Ending

Graham Booker — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 11:36:20 +0000

Things have picked up here. The EE department changed their name to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and as a result, they wanted to take ece.tamu.edu. This has created a bit of a mess. Second, the CE group is moving. We moved a bunch of people out of Zach 100m and are now doing renovations in the new space. Once done, everyone is going to move over there. Also, I was told about some new network changes that were going to happen in the near future. I could see the writing on the wall. There is going to be more work in the future. So here is the result:

I QUIT!

They are not paying me a cent for this. I have started having to do more and more work with no compensation. The only thing that I get out of it is an office with a window, but this is not worth it, especially considering what happens when I do the math. Our new office space has 14 window offices, and we are going to have 13 faculty in the near future. This means that it is very likely that there will be only one window office left. Only about 6 of the offices have descent views, and 1 of those I know is already claimed. The end result, I will likely not get a good view, so the only perk to the job is now useless. So, why keep doing it.

Good luck to them in terms of finding someone else.

Yes, work!

Graham Booker — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 19:22:25 +0000

Well, at the moment my only job is the System Administrator position within the ECE group. It is mostly a job where you don’t have to do too much, but every once in a while something comes up. Today, I got an email about how one user on the eceserver was using 1/3 of the cadence licenses for the EE group. They threatened to cut off access to the licensee from the ece server. It seems that this has been dealt with, but I sort of don’t really think it is over. I will likely hear more about it on monday.