Changes

I've come to realise the thing I actually like about my job, is stuff I can really get my teeth into. Fiddle-faddle helpdesk calls, from users with trivial issues, logged by people who don't speak English, and therefore can't write a coherent fault report, I find immensely frustrating.

Not that I can't solve the problem, as much as it's immensely frustrating to jump through hoops to get anywhere near being able to troubleshoot. This is, of course, leaving aside the part where things can't be solved, simply because I don't have the right tools or access to do so, which is depressingly common.

But yesterday and today was a config change, on a symmetrix. The good part about doing this, is it's possible to 'almost completely' pre-script it. You can define a set of changes, explicitly, and 'preview' run them on your array, to validate them.
Then, once you've put your 'change request' paperwork in, actually _doing_ the change is very straightforward.

The reason I like doing this, is because these changes are actually fairly complex - in order to get storage onto a server, you need to:

( stuff about SAN config )

All in all, I think I like the config and implementation part of my job, way more than the 'dealing with Networker and users' part.

But mostly, having a system that I know well enough that I can prepare what I'm going to do, in detail, the day before (I did spend about a day of prep on it), without really having to worry about some random gotchas that screw it all up, is what I really like about working in storage. Unix is somewhat similar, and Windows ... just isn't.