Engines Full Ahead!

[bjarvis]

I'm trying to be very focussed and productive today. Tomorrow is a work holiday; to keep up with my schedule of deliverables, I need to make every minute of the day count so I can have a weekend of peace of mind.

I've submitted work tickets to retire ten elderly NIS servers. Don't know what those are? Don't worry about it: they're being decommissioned anyway.

I've rescanned the servers in my business group for a particular patch for IBM MQ and may now say in complete honesty that all servers have the latest & greatest patch. Yay me.

Two months ago, I was given the task of resolving all known Veritas-related issues within my business group. Most were merely informational status messages but there was minor tweaking required on a handful. As of last night, all are now fixed and I have a clean report. Yay².

The night crew replaced a failed disk on one server last night. I rounded up the approvals for the after-the-fact work tickets, linked the appropriate items and closed off the tickets. The auditors will be pleased.

The boss asked for a business justification to attend the LISA conference next month. My intuition is that management is looking for some excuse to decline --our middle management is convinced geek conferences are actually golfing vacations in exotic locations because, well, their own management junkets are all like that-- but I wrote up a good justification, linking it back to our stated goals for the coming year. I'm not too optimistic but we'll see.

Back to work...

Comments

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I'm building a NEW NIS server. Yes, you heard that right. Once we migrate our current server environment, we intend to transition to LDAP, but meanwhile, we're still running NIS.

Veritas backups or Veritas volume management? If backups, you have my condolences, I had to wrestle with that product for a couple of years at my last job. It's quite functional but very complicated.

LISA can be turned into a golf vacation; the one time I went, it was a mix of useful and not-so-much. But it's a pretty real conference if you put the time in. :)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

We used to be a NIS+ shop until about three years ago. The back-end servers were all easily converted to LDAP but it took a while to convert our pseudo-DMZ machines (sort of an internal DMZ, not as restricted as the external DMZ wall). That now done, NIS+ is toast around here, except for support of the remaining NeXT machines in some other business group.

Veritas volume management. We do use NetBackup but there's an entire team dedicated to that support so I don't have to mess with it. Most of the VVM issues were related to our servers running "vxrelocd" when they don't really need to since we use RAID 0+1 for local disk arrays, negating the need for a hot spare. Of course, the SAN has eliminated almost all of those local disk arrays as well...

For me, LISA is more a hottub occasion than a golf vacation. It has been years since I've attended and even then it was on my own dime. :-(

[jss]

Woo hoo! bjarvis in da hottub!



Does this hotel even have one?

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Dunno... haven't even looked up the hotel location. Since I'd be driving or taking the subway in, I never bothered to look much further.

But I have a hottub at home...

[jss]

Hm. How many can fit in it, are you Metro-accessible, how late does the Metro run, and how much advanced notice do you need before the horde of folks from that mailing list show up? :-)

[urbear]

If you need any advice/help/criticism/shoulder to cry on with respect to Veritas Netbackup or related products, let me know... that's what I spend 90% of my job doing. I wore a red-and-black "V" polo shirt until last summer, when we were acquired; now I wear a yellow-and-black "S" polo shirt.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I only have to restore the occasional file. All other backup functions are performed by a separate, dedicated team. I don't have much contact with the Backup Support Team so I don't know their opinions on the product, but it's gotta be better than the Legato system we used at the beginning of the decade.

[bigmacbear]

I've often said that given the common Latin expression "in vino veritas" (in wine there is truth) and my recent experiences with Veritas, I think I'd prefer the vino. ;-)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I like the Veritas volume manager and file system packages... they're vastly nicer than anything Sun ships with their Solaris OS. The NetBackup system has worked well as far as I know, but my usage in UNIX Support is limited to restoring the occasional file from backups; we have a separate team which tends to backups, tape management, etc..