The Life of a Sysadmin

Simon Fraser University:

The core environment in support of research computing comprises
currently of a 200 processor compute cluster and 140 TB storage
facility, which also functions as the central storage facility for
the Western Canada Research Grid.

and NEPTUNE Canada:

As a member of the NEPTUNE Canada DMAS development team, the
successful candidate will be responsible for the installation,
implementation, administration, management, maintenance and
ongoing support of all operating systems, communications systems
and applications systems including hardware, software as well as
networking components necessary to develop the NEPTUNE Data
Management and Archiving System.

Sigh...someday...

Another thing I'm trying to do at my new job is make/take more time for long-term planning. I've been dinged by mgt. for this in the past, and while it's not easy to hear I think there has been some validity to this. (My inclination is to concentrate hard on fixing the problems I'm faced with; giving up on something broken, even when doing so would make so much more sense and would free up resources to look for a replacement, just rankles and feels like…well, giving up.) Since the department I'm in is so new, it's even more important to pay attention to this.

Part of the problem is just recognizing that I need to make time. An hour a week to be isolated, and to (say) figure out what I'm going to need to do for the next month, is a habit I'm very conciously trying to adopt.

But another problem is how to keep track of all this. What I've done so far:

• I'm a huge fan of Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, and his Cycle system has served me well. I've become a big fan of a paper organizer, so that's how I keep track of things. But it works est as a way of tracking day-to-day stuff; it's not so good at tracking a project that takes weeks, or months, or years.
• I've read GTD, and that seems like a good system — but it's very different from The Cycle. I don't want to give up the Cycle, I want to graft on to it. And I'm not sure how well I can do that w/GTD.
• I've tried org-mode in Emacs. I'm pretty happy with this, and in fact I switched to it for a while when I first started at this job back in July. It worked well for tracking day-to-day stuff, but I missed the flexibility and ubiquitousness of paper.

So where does that leave me? ATM, (paper planner Cycle) attempting some longer-term project tracking w/org-mode. I figure the TODO bits from org-mode will fit well with the planner, and the flexibility of Emacs and org-mode (different from paper…oh, how I wish I could grep paper) will work well for projects…the records for which should, ideally, be suitable for pasting into wiki-based documentation.

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. If I make it to LISA this year, I'll be looking for a BOF about this. (Or maybe I'll just tackle Tom Limoncelli to the ground and holler "I love you, man!" a la "Say Anything".)

Moving on:

• I really like TrueType font support in Emacs 23, and ttf-inconsolata in particular. Thanks to Emacs-fu for both suggestions.
• I and a co-worker picked up the servers that had, for the last two years or so, been racked at BC Women's hospital (of all places…my sons were both born there). We both had the same reaction when we saw them on a cart, ready to be loaded into our truck: "They're so small!" Seven little 1U servers plus one disk array…you start to think of them as larger-than-life when you're not looking at them all the time, and it's easy to forget just how small they are.
• Some interesting discussion on the Cfengine mailing list about how Cfengine should handle packages.

And now it is time for bed.