Quiet days

[sobrique]

Today is really quiet - there's only 3 of us 'ops' people in, and that includes the manager :).

Which means one of two things is going to happen. It'll be peaceful, and I'll have a very productive week. Or everything will go batshit and I'll have chaotic week of frantically putting out fires.

About the only good news is that the other guy who's in today is a Windows/Active Directory specialist, so I can fob off some of the real horrors onto him.

Not nice I know, but everyone has their burdens to carry. Mine are the NAS/SAN, backup servers, VMWare and Unix in general. Fair trade that he gets Mcafee and Active Directory.

In sysadmin land an entity gets designated in proportion to the pain and effort it generates.
So you might have a single server, service, application or generalisation. They'll usually have their 'owner' or more specifically the person that 'knows about' them - even if that is 'has phone number for vendor'

So where we have 'Unix' which is very general, we have 'Mcafee' which is a very specific application. And of the lot, the latter definitely causes more pain and work.

OK, they're not hard and fast divisions, because some stuff are super/subsets of others. But some things are obscure and horrible enough that you Just Don't Mess with it unless the person that knows is about.

I know there should be documentation. It's a holy grail of all IT operations. It's just that in a lot of cases, documentation doesn't quite align with the reality, and so someone has to know what's going on with it :)

Comments

[mrph.livejournal.com]

I know there should be documentation. It's a holy grail of all IT operations. It's just that in a lot of cases, documentation doesn't quite align with the reality, and so someone has to know what's going on with it

That's why I loved working in engineering. I was one of the people running the drawing office, and I was also in charge of all the product manuals. So I got to carry a big stick. With nails through it.

And I got to persuade people that, yes, they really did want to help me document how everything worked. Including all the jury-rigged test equipment.

*sigh* I miss those days. Although it was a real struggle to get the bloodstains out of my shirts. :)

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Problem is that I, like most of my collegues are crap at doing 'documentation'. Oh stuff like IP addresses and logins gets noted (mostly) but 'how to drive this system' is a question of RTFM.

I can imagine the bloodstains though. Documentation is always one of the things that tends to 'slip' because it's seen as less important. And it is, up until you need it ;p

[jorune.livejournal.com]

Documentation is important but not as important as system knowledge. You may have a copy of Gray's Anatomy before but it doesn't make you a doctor. Too many managers assume that with the right docs you can be anything and of course all the projects that created the systems had ample budgets to allow developers to write the docs. Ha Ha Ha.

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

Oh yes.
Documentation does not a sysadmin make. Our helldesk is the prime example :)