Admin Day

I got to play system administrator all day today. Someone's hard drive blew up and I got to swap it and restage their machine. No sooner was I in the middle of that than I found out  the yum repository had been restored from tape a while back and was missing a bunch of files to other things could install. I backed up a couple steps and fixed that. Then finished setting up their person's machine.

Then came a bunch of bench systems. Bench systems are a piece of plywood with a motherboard and a bunch of other computer kind of bits bolted to it. These are laid open and make it very easy for boards to be swapped. For the first time in my life, I got to add CPU chips to the motherboard and the CPU fans. Then something amazing happened. It didn't blow up. Both the systems worked and reported all the bits I checked.

Then came one of our real servers. This server will become one of those real servers the every one in the company relies on to do things every day. All of software development will use it daily. It took me half the afternoon to get it up and running (twice, because I bright it up on the wrong kernel the first time) and even then I needed help with the final network configuration. The trouble turned out to be a path that normally happens automatically, but was now missing in the manual set up  (Set up is two words? Who knew?)

As I write this, it just doesn't sound like a lot of work. It is. System administration is like that. So many people think it is easy to put computers together and then put networks together and then make everything work and then make everything only work when the right people want it to work. It is a nightmare. System Administrators are expected to kill themselves to make things work. Normally the hours suck, but not today.

Today the deadlines made sense. The effort made me feel like I learned something and that I got something done. Today was a busy, but a good day. More please.