I'm a Bad Person

[bjarvis]

I've been UNIX primary all of this week so I've barely had enough time to dash downstairs to get a salad for lunch. Today, I've passed the pager to the weekend guys so I'm off the hook.

Since I was in the vicinity for a separate business function, I indulged my sudden craving for a fast greasy McDonald's burger. Fortunately, my inner angel nudged me at the last minute, compelling me to replace my longing for a Big Mac with a mere double cheeseburger. Well, two of them actually. This small substitution hopefully staved off my eventual death-by-artery-clogging by a few hours, but I still feel dirty in a contented, satisfied kind of way.

Comments

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

As ugly as the chore can be, it's actually better than it used to be several years ago.

When I started in the primary rotation in 1999, the servers tended to drop like flies regularly, there were no automatic failovers and/or clusters, switching to contingency was painful, disks and CPUs were unreliabable, automated monitoring was shaky and backups were sluggish. The pressure was incredible.

Nowadays, our servers are in clusters, load balancers redirect traffic as needed, we have durable SAN arrays, our monitoring is pretty good & interconnected and our backup libraries are vastly improved. In short, the pressure is vastly less intense than it used to be --thank god. I would have burnt out years ago otherwise.

[quirkstreet.livejournal.com]

I started sysadminning in 1999 and I recall that era, although I wasn't primary for anything until just before Y2K. When the other admins quit and I got to do the shutdown/startup. But it wasn't a high-pressure organization. ;-)

Now I'm back in a small shop without most of those amenities you list, but .... once again, luckily ..... it's not high pressure.

I absolutely burned out when I was in a high-pressure shop without good failovers/clustering/etc.