SysAdmin on Thoughts and Ramblings

I finally Quit

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?

New Semester

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.

Power Outage Aftermath

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.

Stupid Dell

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.

Paid now

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

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

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:

Yes, work!

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.