SysAdmin Rite of Passage

Greg, one of my colleagues in an adjacent cube, is having a very hard day today and it's only 9:30 AM.

About 30 minutes ago, he meant to type the following (with root privileges):
crontab -l | grep reboot

What he actually typed was:
crontab -l | reboot

For the non-geek, the first command would have searched through the list of automatically-scheduled commands for the time & date of the automated reboot. The second one listed the commands and initiated the reboot immediately. It's a small typo with big consequences: the unscheduled reboot set off all manner of alarms & automated pages for the system administrator staff, our managers, the business users, the developers, the customer support staff and our senior corporate management. There's a conference call in progress at the moment to examine the causes & consequences of the reboot.

Since Greg is something of a perfectionist, he's dying of embarrassment as I type this, and would like nothing better than have the earth swallow him up.

This significant faux pas is, for our staff at least, something of a rite of passage: every senior admin in our data centers has made this kind of error at least once in his/her career. I've done it myself at least twice in the past decade or so, which isn't a bad average since I support a division of approximately 400 servers. In a twisted kind of way, Greg has finally arrived: he's now truly One Of Us. :-)

It's not much of a comfort at the moment, but we'll have a good laugh about it some day.

SysAdmin Rite of Passage

Greg, one of my colleagues in an adjacent cube, is having a very hard day today and it's only 9:30 AM.

About 30 minutes ago, he meant to type the following (with root privileges):
crontab -l | grep reboot

What he actually typed was:
crontab -l | reboot

For the non-geek, the first command would have searched through the list of automatically-scheduled commands for the time & date of the automated reboot. The second one listed the commands and initiated the reboot immediately. It's a small typo with big consequences: the unscheduled reboot set off all manner of alarms & automated pages for the system administrator staff, our managers, the business users, the developers, the customer support staff and our senior corporate management. There's a conference call in progress at the moment to examine the causes & consequences of the reboot.

Since Greg is something of a perfectionist, he's dying of embarrassment as I type this, and would like nothing better than have the earth swallow him up.

This significant faux pas is, for our staff at least, something of a rite of passage: every senior admin in our data centers has made this kind of error at least once in his/her career. I've done it myself at least twice in the past decade or so, which isn't a bad average since I support a division of approximately 400 servers. In a twisted kind of way, Greg has finally arrived: he's now truly One Of Us. :-)

It's not much of a comfort at the moment, but we'll have a good laugh about it some day.

Easy Weekend

I did accomplish a few things around the house this weekend, although nothing like as much as I had originally hoped.

( Click here for mundane details. )

Easy Weekend

I did accomplish a few things around the house this weekend, although nothing like as much as I had originally hoped.

( Click here for mundane details. )

Cold Turkey

I decided recently that I was drinking entirely too much Coke Classic.

There is a vending machine at my office and it was fairly common for me to start my day with a 20 oz bottle; on particularly difficult days, I might have another in the late afternoon. I didn't think too much about how much I was consuming or spending on soft drinks in general.

In the past couple of months, Coca-Cola has had yet another promotion in progress. One in 12 bottle caps offers a free 20 oz Coke as a prize, among other things. Occasionally, I would get such a lucky bottle cap. There isn't a convenience store near my office so I would lob these caps into an otherwise empty drawer for safe-keeping. About three weeks ago, however, I noticed that I now had 23 such winning bottle caps. If the distribution is indeed 1 in 12, I had to have consumed 276 bottles of Coke since the start of the promotion in July.

This can't be a good thing.

I now keep a case of 10 oz bottles of apple juice in my filing cabinet and have been polishing off about two per day. Yes, there's still a lot of sugar in those bottles, but it's about 1/3 of my former soft drink sugar intake. I've lost 8lbs and a little width around the middle. Even my anticipated caffeine withdrawal bitchiness didn't manifest.

And as of last Friday, Coca-Cola Enterprises had lost 6.3% of its share value.

Cold Turkey

I decided recently that I was drinking entirely too much Coke Classic.

There is a vending machine at my office and it was fairly common for me to start my day with a 20 oz bottle; on particularly difficult days, I might have another in the late afternoon. I didn't think too much about how much I was consuming or spending on soft drinks in general.

In the past couple of months, Coca-Cola has had yet another promotion in progress. One in 12 bottle caps offers a free 20 oz Coke as a prize, among other things. Occasionally, I would get such a lucky bottle cap. There isn't a convenience store near my office so I would lob these caps into an otherwise empty drawer for safe-keeping. About three weeks ago, however, I noticed that I now had 23 such winning bottle caps. If the distribution is indeed 1 in 12, I had to have consumed 276 bottles of Coke since the start of the promotion in July.

This can't be a good thing.

I now keep a case of 10 oz bottles of apple juice in my filing cabinet and have been polishing off about two per day. Yes, there's still a lot of sugar in those bottles, but it's about 1/3 of my former soft drink sugar intake. I've lost 8lbs and a little width around the middle. Even my anticipated caffeine withdrawal bitchiness didn't manifest.

And as of last Friday, Coca-Cola Enterprises had lost 6.3% of its share value.