Hello,
I'm compiling a collection of stories from the systems administrator trenches. They can be short or long, funny or about a particularly challenging problem or period, or even something that appeared very technically challenging and ended up being something very simple. Stories which are more political would be ok so long as they do not have an agenda or can be interpreted as a public attack.
I can't promise money but I can promise 15 minutes of fame. The stories will be accumulated over the next few months and go into a book about real world experiences of Systems Administrators and Systems Engineers. Some of the material may be used in our training classes, as well. All stories will be duly credited and I'll even buy a beer (or other non-alcoholic beverage) for anyone I ever meet in person.
Stories may be edited for grammar or clarity.
This book is still in the proposal stage so there is no firm target date, yet. If for some reason the book is not published (just like tech projects, books are sometimes cancelled at the last minute) they will go up on our website.
Thanks!
-Geoff
--------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://eifel-consulting.biz http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/
On 6.6.2010 13.19, Geoff Galitz wrote:
I'm compiling a collection of stories from the systems administrator trenches. They can be short or long, funny or about a particularly challenging problem or period, or even something that appeared very technically challenging and ended up being something very simple. Stories which are more political would be ok so long as they do not have an agenda or can be interpreted as a public attack.
I can't promise money but I can promise 15 minutes of fame. The stories will be accumulated over the next few months and go into a book about real world experiences of Systems Administrators and Systems Engineers. Some of the material may be used in our training classes, as well. All stories will be duly credited and I'll even buy a beer (or other non-alcoholic beverage) for anyone I ever meet in person.
Stories may be edited for grammar or clarity.
This book is still in the proposal stage so there is no firm target date, yet. If for some reason the book is not published (just like tech projects, books are sometimes cancelled at the last minute) they will go up on our website.
What will be the intended audience? How much technical detail can be mentioned? Does one assume that the readers know what is grub, initrd, xen, amavisd etc?
- Jussi
What will be the intended audience? How much technical detail can be mentioned? Does one assume that the readers know what is grub, initrd, xen, amavisd etc?
- Jussi
The intended audience is anyone in the Systems Administration or Systems Engineering field at any technical level. It is assumed basic technologies such as grub and initrd are already known, but not necessarily well understood. I may add technical introductions to those technologies if needed.
Contributors should not worry too much about this, it is my job as editor/writer to make sure that needed relevant technical information is introduced as necessary.
-geoff
--------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://eifel-consulting.biz/ http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/
On Sun, 6 Jun 2010, Geoff Galitz wrote:
What will be the intended audience? How much technical detail can be mentioned? Does one assume that the readers know what is grub, initrd, xen, amavisd etc?
The intended audience is anyone in the Systems Administration or Systems Engineering field at any technical level. It is assumed basic technologies such as grub and initrd are already known, but not necessarily well understood. I may add technical introductions to those technologies if needed.
Contributors should not worry too much about this, it is my job as editor/writer to make sure that needed relevant technical information is introduced as necessary.
i see the potential for amusing anecdotes. geek humour, as it were.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WM977mANl8
rday
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 4:04 AM, Robert P. J. Day rpjday@crashcourse.ca wrote:
There's also this one on the the impotence of proofreading:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OonDPGwAyfQ&feature=related
(No, that was NOT a typo.)
mhr
On 10-06-06 06:19 AM, Geoff Galitz wrote:
Hello,
I'm compiling a collection of stories from the systems administrator trenches. They can be short or long, funny or about a particularly challenging problem or period, or even something that appeared very technically challenging and ended up being something very simple. Stories which are more political would be ok so long as they do not have an agenda or can be interpreted as a public attack.
I can't promise money but I can promise 15 minutes of fame. The stories will be accumulated over the next few months and go into a book about real world experiences of Systems Administrators and Systems Engineers. Some of the material may be used in our training classes, as well. All stories will be duly credited and I'll even buy a beer (or other non-alcoholic beverage) for anyone I ever meet in person.
Stories may be edited for grammar or clarity.
This book is still in the proposal stage so there is no firm target date, yet. If for some reason the book is not published (just like tech projects, books are sometimes cancelled at the last minute) they will go up on our website.
Thanks!
-Geoff
Under the category of "learn from the mistake of others..."
About eight years ago, I was working on a program with tight deadlines. I'd worked through the night, only catching an hour or two of sleep in the office.
The next morning, one of the servers remounted it's file systems read-only. Being a small shop, I decided to just take the server down to run a quick fsck.ext2. In my sleepiness though, I typed 'mkfs.ext2'.
When people say that "root" is god, well, no one asks god "Are you sure?".
All nighters are bad news, mistakes are easily made at these times as we have all learnt the hard way ;)
*cough* erased the backups and spent the night re-backing up data so nothing actually got done *cough*
I do remember spending a few days putting together some systems check for my self and my colleague to use such as daily, weekly and monthly systems checks for all IT aspects (physical, virtual, power, redundancy, connectivity etc...) only to have something fail the next day (so it really paid off!) and then nothing has broken since?...Just goes to show you never know!
Also recently upgraded my personal Ubuntu server to a RAID 6 from a RAID 5 (about a week ago) and now it looks like one of the drives is dying, again, just in time!
On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 08:22:22PM +0100, James Bensley wrote:
redundancy, connectivity etc...) only to have something fail the next day (so it really paid off!) and then nothing has broken since?...Just goes to show you never know!
Also recently upgraded my personal Ubuntu server to a RAID 6 from a RAID 5 (about a week ago) and now it looks like one of the drives is dying, again, just in time!
Does this go to show the value of preparedness? Or does it illustrate the power of luck? Or some intersection? I've often been lucky about when and how stuff breaks down. And I've known people with what looked like real computer jinxes. On the one hand, you never want to just trust your luck. On the other, if luck can be involved, could it be that the profession selects for those who have it?
Whit
I think Whit you have raised some deeper questions maybe about probability, sod's law, the uncertanty principle, karma, etc etc...Maybe a venn diagram covering luck and preparedness is in order, who knows, we/I am digressing....
I would like to point out that at home I'm pretty sure I'm jinxed; my ubuntu server has decided X ins't going to work any more, nor the sound (may be related) and the raid is dying, all on the same day?!?!?!
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Digimer linux@alteeve.com wrote:
Under the category of "learn from the mistake of others..."
About eight years ago, I was working on a program with tight deadlines. I'd worked through the night, only catching an hour or two of sleep in the office.
The next morning, one of the servers remounted it's file systems read-only. Being a small shop, I decided to just take the server down to run a quick fsck.ext2. In my sleepiness though, I typed 'mkfs.ext2'.
When people say that "root" is god, well, no one asks god "Are you sure?".
Way back in the stone age, I was a sys admin at my university, working the graveyard (i.e., backup) shift two days a week and an occasional Sunday. On Sundays, we did the full backup and restore, but we switched out the disk packs (I said this was a long time ago) so we never lost more than a week's worth of data at the time. Well, almost never....
My last Sunday there, I accidentally reinitialized all the disks after the backup but before I had switched them. Then, I realized what I did, switched them anyway, and reinitialized them again, then did a full restore.
Everything would have been fine if the file system hadn't crashed that Friday afternoon....
This was on a Xerox Sigma 7 (I'm dating myself).
UNIX horror story: 24 years ago, I was working on a development system (i.e., nothing critical on it) and my latest build didn't work the way I expected, so I erased it with an 'rm -rf *' - except that I was in the root directory at the time, not my build directory. By the time I realized what I had done, it was too far gone to recover, so I wound up reinstalling the whole system. No harm done (I did things like that sometimes on purpose, when it was *my* machine involved), but I don't do 'rm -rf' of anything any more without double-checking where I am FIRST, even if the default "-v" is set.
(unsigned confession)
On Sun, Jun 06, 2010 at 03:06:18PM -0700, MHR wrote:
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 10:53 AM, Digimer linux@alteeve.com wrote:
Under the category of "learn from the mistake of others..."
About eight years ago, I was working on a program with tight deadlines. I'd worked through the night, only catching an hour or two of sleep in the office.
The next morning, one of the servers remounted it's file systems read-only. Being a small shop, I decided to just take the server down to run a quick fsck.ext2. In my sleepiness though, I typed 'mkfs.ext2'.
When people say that "root" is god, well, no one asks god "Are you sure?".
Way back in the stone age, I was a sys admin at my university, working the graveyard (i.e., backup) shift two days a week and an occasional Sunday. On Sundays, we did the full backup and restore, but we switched out the disk packs (I said this was a long time ago) so we never lost more than a week's worth of data at the time. Well, almost never....
My last Sunday there, I accidentally reinitialized all the disks after the backup but before I had switched them. Then, I realized what I did, switched them anyway, and reinitialized them again, then did a full restore.
Everything would have been fine if the file system hadn't crashed that Friday afternoon....
This was on a Xerox Sigma 7 (I'm dating myself).
UNIX horror story: 24 years ago, I was working on a development system (i.e., nothing critical on it) and my latest build didn't work the way I expected, so I erased it with an 'rm -rf *' - except that I was in the root directory at the time, not my build directory. By the time I realized what I had done, it was too far gone to recover, so I wound up reinstalling the whole system. No harm done (I did things like that sometimes on purpose, when it was *my* machine involved), but I don't do 'rm -rf' of anything any more without double-checking where I am FIRST, even if the default "-v" is set.
(unsigned confession)
I had quite simmilar experience, but I typed `chown -R user:group' / (instead of ./). Now I'm also checking it for few times and I learned to use `.' instead of `./', :)
On 06/06/2010 11:19 AM, Geoff Galitz wrote:
I'm compiling a collection of stories from the systems administrator trenches.
have you considered a wiki for this ? rather than clogging up the lists. People could just post their stories there and you get readily editable content straight out.
- KB
-
Digimer -
Dominik Zyla -
Geoff Galitz -
James Bensley -
Jussi Hirvi -
Karanbir Singh -
MHR -
Robert P. J. Day -
Whit Blauvelt