SysAdmin
I'm a weird fellow, always have been. I chop this up to personality. But, I've got some strange issues that I've spent a long time trying to figure out, such as: I spend way to much time thinking about things I need to do and not enough time doing them. I'm not talking a couple minutes, I'm talking weeks. I've put off tasks for months because of FUD, when the task itself would only take a handful of hours to complete... worst of all, ...
It snuck up on me this year... I guess thats a good sign that we're all working hard. Happy SA Day! May your coffee cups stay full, donuts fresh, and systems stable.
This is a very important year for me. I'm going through an incredible amount of personal growth, personally and professionally. I've hit that point in my life where I'm out of culturally imposed goals... the midlife lull I'll call it. When your a kid you have clear cut goals... namely, move the hell out. When you do, you have more clear cultural goals: get an education, good job, nice car, nice home (whatever "home" means to you), wife, ...
I was asked to respond to this post: System Administration; an insider
I was bummed out when reading How do I get my sysadmin to do anything? by Paul Boutin. Most of the content is fine, sure, but this line bothered me: No one sets out to be a professional systems administrator -- do you ever see kids wearing toy pagers playing sysadmin? ... well, I did, in essence. From high school on I was destine to be an SA. Its what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be. I would draw Slayer, Megadeth, and "Sun ...
This is old news, but in case you missed it, the Splunk initiated 'first annual Sysadmin of the Year (SAOTY) contest" list of winners was announced in early December. View the list of winners here. Congrats to Michael Beck for being crowned SA of the Year. On a personal note, thanks to those of you who nominated me. I'll have to work even harder next year and steal the trophy for Joyent. ;)
It occurs to me that this guy has become the new face of system administration: Splunk has splattered this guys face everywhere it seems. And why not? He's a big lovable guy. Don't you just wanna hug him? So is this the new image of SA's? Less BOFH and more... I dunno, whatever he is. The natural upshot is that the more comfortable they feel the more likely they'll actually listen to what you tell them... one can hope anyway. ...
I read Thomas Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators when I was at Homestead and needed to better organize myself. There the problem was that I had several very long running projects that moved along so slowly that they'd get lost in the day-to-day shuffle or just outright forgotten. At Joyent things are much different, I'm not in an extremely fast moving and constantly evolving environment servicing hundreds of customers ...
I had a real problem when I arrived at Joyent, people would complain about page load times, web apps "feeling slow", or judgments on server performance based on page serving. What I needed was a way to quantify page loads so that I could measure the effects of change to the underlying structure. Did tweaking PostgreSQL's query cache actually help? How much did it help? Whats the effect of turning this nob? These are all questions that I ...
There has been a lot of buzz around (mt) MediaTemple's latest offering this week: (gs) Grid Server. I listened to a podCast at TechCrunch and was really sucked into the marketing speak about the offering. But as a SysAdmin I wanted to know how it worked. The key to the product is that you setup your enviroment once and its "automatically deployed on the grid", thereby even your little site is benefiting from the collective resources of the ...