entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

<lifeinbeta> allofmp3.com is sadly gone
<ronebofh> oh, it is?  good.
<lifeinbeta> not a fan of the russian mob?
<ronebofh> definitely not.
* lifeinbeta reaches for the polonium
<ronebofh> i'm already radioactive, man.
<aDe> oh, so that's why you're in such a state of decay
<ronebofh> only half of me.
* aDe puts rone in a lead box
<aDe> Schroedinger's Sysadmin.
<ronebofh> what's schroedinger's sysadmin?  you can't tell if he's surly or not until you open the box?
<aDe> no.  you *know* he's surly.  he's a sysadmin.
<aDe> you just can't tell whether all your files have been deleted until you open the box.

My boss and i had a very similar moment to today's Dilbert a few weeks ago; he was trying to set up our delegated reverse DNS and getting nothing.  He called me to his desk; i looked at the zone file and immediately pointed out that the serial number was too long.  He was far from thrilled.

<kevinying> i almost bought the wine named Solaris because that was the only thing I recognized in that rack
<ronebofh> it would need three years to be ready to drink!
<davewsmith_blog> 19" rack?

Really, the wiki host should've been called library-of-babel, but that's an unwieldy hostname.  aleph would've been better suited to the monitoring host, but that one has the boring sjl-monitor1 moniker, as it's a production machine.

I've had my issues with naming hosts before.  Even though the sane choice is to go with the boring but practical scheme for the production systems, it still feels like i'm giving up a fundamentally fun part of my job.

I'm also occasionally toying with the idea of changing my journal's name (and have been for a couple of years).  I keep coming up with cool names that unfortunately are not representative of, well, me.

[2006/10/21 17:09:11] {co-worker} says: http://www.visiblepath.com/cgi-bin/env.pl

[2006/10/21 17:09:16] ronebofh says: ... wtf
[2006/10/21 17:09:35] ronebofh says: abort! abort!

Today marked about 8 hours of work.  Tomorrow might well be the same, as well as next Saturday, and the Saturday and Sunday after that.  Only next Sunday will be free, as i will be seeing Kimmy walk her half-marathon in San Francisco.

So what's happening?  Well, i was hired at Visible Path to help build a new datacenter which will host the new version of our product.  Things were well planned out, but every available wiggle space on the time axis has been consumed by vendor-caused delays.  Thus, the crunch; the only consolation is that we get to go home at night, whereas the actual developers, well, good luck, fellas.  I still feel a tad guilty for going to Ecuador at what was one of the worse times, but my boss has waved my concerns off.  So far, we're doing well, and we are far from panic.  But there's no time for letting up; the product launch date is Oct 30, except that upper management wants stuff live on the 28th.

As a sysadmin, i can't think of a better opportunity than building a datacenter from scratch.  You get the chance to set everything up the way you want it, instead of having to put up with cable spaghetti or rack layouts designed by monkeys on Valium or the sinking realization that whoever chose the colocation facility only did it because he was shtupping the salesperson.  We have a good team and our eyes, brains, and hands seem to overlap in the right spots.  It's a good thing.

reddragdiva: "I know many an outsourcee who has been sent to EDS. The corporate culture is built in the image of Ross Perot's brain. It is not only deeply psychotic, it's Texan."

I've resorted to describing my job to non-technical people as "computer herder."

So, we used to have an incredibly obnoxious and cumbersome naming scheme, where the first letter was either S for system or N for network, then a four-digit location code, which started with 1 for East Coast and Europe and 2 for West Coast and Asia-Pacific. Then a 3-letter code that gave a vague hint regarding the machine's function or model, then a 2-digit serial number. Thus, s2009mgw06 is the sixth mail gateway machine at location 2009 (our current colo).

The new and improved naming scheme is: one letter, P for production, D for development, Q for QA; a two-digit location code; a mandatory 3-letter, "vague hint" code; an optional 3-letter supplementary code; and a 2-digit serial number. Thus, p01dnsi03 is the third 'i'nternal DNS server at location 01 (the new colo).

Someone explain to me how the latter is an improvement. I really, really loathe this.

I'm currently freezing my ass off in our cage at the Equinix co-lo facility on Great Oaks. Here they have a Flavia Beverage System, which seems to be the practical result of someone reading about the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation's Nutri-Matic machine and thinking, "Hey, that's a GREAT idea!" The only thing missing is the cheerful attitude.