Saturday, October 07, 2006

A work day

A rundown of a saturday workday for Josh.

  • Got in about 5 minutes late, 9:05 am.
  • Decided again not to purge my main mailbox (now at 12,000+ messages) If I don't stay on top of it every day it reaches critical mass pretty fast and explodes to this rediculous size.
  • Checked the report on server backups that happened overnight (all good)
  • Checked the health of a mail server I recently deployed, did a little queue manipulation that I'll need to automate soon
  • Looked at the messages in the Network Operations Center (NOC) support queue, closed a couple, updated a trouble ticket and closed it.
  • Took my break. Jae packed me a lunch so I didn't get lunch. Walked over to Starbucks, sat in the sun, read the first essay in _The Portable MBA_, which I borrowed from our General Manager's office.
  • Started defining the procedure we'll use to migrate accounts from our current mail system to our almost ready new mail system. Timing is everything.
  • Delivered the offsite backup to the place with the vault. The guard was new and I was his first vault customer. Basically I trained him. Showed him what paperwork to use, told him, "No, you don't let me through that door." Explained that he should check my ID against the photocopy of my ID in the book in the vault. Then I sat in the empty, air conditioned, echoy lobby for about 15 minutes until he brought me the disk I was picking up in exchange for the one I dropped off.
  • I answered the phone a couple times when there was overflow. Didn't get bogged down into any desktop support, luckily.
  • Now, in the remaining couple hours, I should get the migration procedure into the company wiki, and review trouble tickets one more time before leaving for my weekend.

1 comment:

Josh Gentry said...

I don't suck. I'm not brilliant, but I don't suck.

Sunday at 6pm got a page that our internal database server was down. That's not cool, but there was an admin on shift, so I wasn't going to worry about it. Then there was a page that one of the web servers in the server farm was down. Hmmm, then they were all down, and a radius server was down. At this point it was obvious that these were symptoms of some underlying problem, and I drove into the office.

The air conditioner in the machine room wasn't cooling. This is BAD. In 30 minutes it went from 60 degrees in that room to 90, and servers were starting to overheat and crash. Then, Marsha had rolled the portable air conditioner unit into the machine room to help, but she plugged it into the same power strip as the webfarm and blew its fuse. ARg. There was much triage as a result. Went home at 9pm.

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