Khaki

Had a lovely experience at work last Friday. In using the restroom facilities, the condensation from the toilet managed to soak the back of my khaki shorts. I discovered this as I hiked my pants up and felt an unwarranted wetness.

Were I bright enough to have my keys on my, I would have lit out for the territories like a Huck Finn of shame. Most likely the only people who would have seen my embarrassment would be the Asian dry cleaners I walk by every day.

Since khaki shows up any dab of moisture like a flood it looked like I had soaked myself. As I am not incontinent and rather positive that no one would understand my tale of woe I was in a bit of pickle. For bonus, it was right around lunchtime (as well as the time when everyone was leaving due to a short day) so my misfortune was likely to be discovered and probably pointed at and laughed at (completely understandable, I would have done the same). I hid in the bathroom attempting to Mr. Myiagi the moisture out of my drawers. For future reference it took about 20 minutes to become wearable.

Real ego booster for the day.

July 27, 2009 | Filed Under personal, work | Comments Off 

Bad Day – High Load

Part of the day why yesterday was a long day at work.

high load

high load

That’s right, a load of 96.75 with a five minute average of 69.14 … ouch.

October 17, 2008 | Filed Under geek, work | Comments Off 

tech support hightlight of the day

Someone wrote a daily cronjob to rsync a 150 GB home directory to 7 Gb root directory. This didn’t work out as well as they hoped.

September 12, 2007 | Filed Under work | Comments Off 

being beat by nfs

Been fighting a long series of problems with a Rocks cluster. It’s come down to a serial device that locked up every single node, and now a NFS issue that appears to be not allowing nodes to boot.

It’s been awhile since I’ve dealt with NFS, but it seems odd that commenting out an entry in /etc/exports will allow the nodes to boot perfectly fine. If the entry is left uncommented, the node will completely lock up on startup.

There’s now a gigantic list of work to do, and no end in sight. Every time I clean out my inbox, and get items added to my todo list, there’s another half-dozen items needing attention. I’m learning a bit, but it’s all surface type of information. There’s no time to dig into anything. I started making some progress on my network monitor app, but that had to be put aside. I need to make the time to get back to that soon.

September 11, 2007 | Filed Under work | Comments Off 

Self Documentation

I was thinking today about the idea of self-documenting servers. I’m in a situation at work now where I’m dealing with a large number of undocumented (Unix) servers. Startup scripts are in abnormal locations, multiple numbers of configuration files, identical binary files in a half-dozen places. It’s a huge challenge attempting to manage these systems. I’ve been attempting to determine the best way to manage changes that I make to a system. The best I’ve come up with is a .txt file on each server where all users can review system changes. It’s easy to automatically append changes to the end of the file. I think the next step would be automatically getting these .txt files into a wiki.

August 27, 2007 | Filed Under work | Comments Off