Bad sysadmin, no biscuit…

Sometimes in our community, it’s important to point out when people do the wrong thing. In the case of Sys Admins, who regularly get blasted by end users for not respecting them, sometimes we actually do the wrong thing. In this case, the Sys Admin who has been doing this for years should really know better. The behavior is called being a “Cowboy.” This is where a sysadmin makes a change to a system w/o letting other sysadmins know, or letting the users know that the change is being made. It’s really our responsibility to do the right thing and 1) ask first and 2) notify of the change in question.

I bring this up because recently, I had a sysadmin make a change to a production system. As minor as a change this was, it cause big problems. The change was made, admittedly by him, to a system that he knew nothing about, and it was made at 11pm on a Saturday night. This change caused the test system to “complain” about a service that it couldn’t test. Ultimately waking someone, who shouldn’t have been woken up. This ends up creating a “child who cries wolf syndrome”

It’s all about professionalism. When we as admins do anything that could affect someone else, we need to be clear about what it is, why we’re doing it, and make sure its a positive change.

Overheard at work “We need to hire sysadmins who look at this as a job, and not a gig”

Sometimes it’s not worth it..

Bought a Vantec UGT-ST450-CB eSATA Expresscard/32 card a couple of months ago. Had it running perfectly in Tiger. When I upgraded to Leopard, it worked just fine until I re-installed (fresh) for a completely different reason. I realized that I had not had the latest driver. I contacted Vantec and asked for a new driver. (You can’t download MacOSX drivers from their site. Only Windows. heh…

The tech essentially told me that the card wasn’t supported, and there was nothing he could do about it. Nice job! (I do tech support for my company and know better than to tell customers that in the way that he did it.) After a bit of shock and dismay, I asked him for the chipset manufacturer. He told me it was Silicon Image.. Well 30 seconds of googling led me to their site and found the driver.

All is well.

Once again, tech support at crappy companies makes us look good.

More LCD fun..

My bluetooth LCD controller is working beautifully. I have lcdproc running with GrowlLCD, an awesome plugin written by Eric in San Diego.  I then wrote a small applescript that Mail.app calls when I get a Nagios alert.

Works like a charm!

LCD, lcdproc, Arduino and Bluetooth Radio…

Just hacked together a wireless Growl Notifier with a 2 line serial LCD connected to an Arduino and Bluetooth radio. It lets me know when downloads are complete, when Adium or Twitter need my attention or any other apps that you can connect to the lcdproc server.. Very cool!

Now that its 5:21am, I should really get to sleep :)

I learned something new…

Today I learned that I am not invincible. I learned that if I feel an odd tingling sensation on my head, dry mouth, and intense sweating, that I should immediately sit down. Unfortunately, I did not know this until this afternoon and ended up on the floor of the doctors office.

If you have to faint, the doctors office is the right place to do it.

This is all stemming from a tiny infection on my right ring finger. heh.

Ok, this is really the first post.

I’ve just upgraded my service with (mt) Media Temple. Welcome all!

I hope to make this my new home on the vast tubes of the interwebs.