In our being-a-sysadmin series, I thought it’d be an interesting thought experiment to journal what my day involved. Today was about as varied as it gets.

On the way in, I stopped by Dunkin Donuts and picked up some breakfast for me and a box of donut holes for the office. As a team, we’re good to each other — someone usually always brings in snacks, on average, once or twice a week.

I checked my email, and followed up on some notifications and preparations we’re making for a building cooling outage on Monday. I was able to refine our lists a little more of which systems will need to stay up, and which can be taken down if necessary.

I loaded a new tape into the Networker external drive, since my Monday night weekly backups always take more than one tape. These finished up by noon. All of the systems in these groups completed successfully, so there wasn’t any follow-on work to do.

I fielded hostname/networking requests, including a gigE uplink for a research server. (They were also asking about link aggregation, but after further “interviewing” (that’s what librarians call it,) we decided that even a single network connection wouldn’t be the bottleneck with this system/data.)

I followed up with all of the entrants in the Computing Habitat Programming Competition, trying to see to their immediate start up needs so they can work over spring break. Setup some meetings for the rest of the week.

I blogged once or twice, and had some side conversations about fantasy baseball, my dog, and the fact Erin Andrews will be at the Illini game on Thursday.

I contacted the city about my neighborhood problems.

I tossed a few emails back and forth with my mom and brother.

Wearing my RedHat hat, I reinstalled two systems in a cluster. This was part kickstart and part manual configuration, although I talked with our kickstart admin and setup a few more kickstart flags to automate more of the setup.

I printed out CHPC materials and discovered I needed more manilla folders in the office.

I continued more TSM offsite work, and by 5pm was able to rotate 5-6 tapes in/out of the safe as a part of our TSM disaster recovery procedures.

I confirmed the Confluence backups on one of our not-agora servers were being done and backed up in TSM.

I had a discussion with CITES about network switch purchases, different networking scenarios, Netgear vs HP, etc.

I went to the library over lunch to scan some reading in for tonight. Once I got the book from the reserves, I found out the scanner in the reference room was broken. I was told there were three scanners in the stacks, so I went to check those out but they weren’t as easy to use. Because they were slower to use, didn’t look as good, and had more post processing time, I decided not to scan the book and went to my stacks cube to read/skim as much as I could. I was there for 45 minutes or so when the pipe-fitter guys came back from lunch and started making a bunch of noise. (The stacks are finally getting a sprinker system.) I returned the book and went back to work.

I rewrote a little perl script that mines data out of TSM logs, identifying files that couldn’t be backed up becase of case-sensitivity issues. Had discussions with my manager about what we planned to do about that (we decided to push it off on the security guy.) In this lesson, our hero is reminded not to write scripts in /tmp that he plans to keep around for a while. (I need to figure out what’s purging old files out of /tmp…)

I picked up Zorba’s on the way back to the office. AFAIK, that’s the first time I’ve eaten their stuff outside of the restaurant. The bag did not get as greasy as I expected. It was delicious.

I laughed coming back from lunch when I saw a guy wearing shorts. It was only like 38 at the time, but it felt warmer in the sunlight. He reminded me of Greg. It’s odd that Greg’s ph entry still exists, and says “deceased”

I reviewed procurement bulletins to see who was buying what on campus. It looks like athletics is getting new turf, but nothing relating to IT that I’d want to file.

I helped a student point his Vista laptop to our print server. It’s never usually a networking issue, but somehow they always come to me with these types of questions. I was able to help the guy out. (In the typical scenario that he did just what I did, but it didn’t work for him, and did work for me.)

I’m a little concerned about some status/alert emails from our DNS config distribution system — somehow it’s getting sent empty files more frequently now. I have watchdog checks in place to make sure the servers don’t load an empty file, but I didn’t spend the time to track down why.

I scanned my work blogs. Atlassian is doing a 6 month experiment with “20% time,” and they’re blogging it. This should be interesting.

I ran out of LTO tape labels for TSM, so I fired up the software and printed out 128 more labels. It’s good to have printed labels around ahead of time, so you’re not trying to relearn how to make/print them when you desperately need them. Along those lines, when I do spend the effort to print them, I print a few pages so it lasts me a while.

And, finally, I decided today was a neat cross section of the different roles of my job (Networker admin, TSM admin, RedHat admin, networking support, network designer, helpdesk, and more) and of different “quadrants” of work (important/immediate, important/not-immediate, not-important/immediate, etc.) that I figured it was worth blogging. I have a very multi-faceted job.

Tonight’s plans include walking the dog, making dinner, grumbling about nothing on TV/TiVo (except the shuttle launch from last night I’ll watch,) and studying. On bat for the academics are doing online research about telegraph code books and their evolution, and reading about student wireless coops. Maybe I’ll blog later about nifty developing-country high latency wireless networks.

I’ve been trying to update my Toshiba M200 tablet this semester. This hasn’t been as easy as it should be. (No Mac jokes please.) The Tosh doesn’t have an internal CD/DVD drive or floppy drive, so my boot options are USB CD/DVD player, SD card, or network.

Apparently, the Tosh BIOS is picky about brands/types of CD/DVD players, as the two players I tried didn’t work for boot. Searching around, this seems to be a known problem but resolved if you have a Toshiba USB reader.

Then we tried the network, and it will PXE/RIS boot okay… but our images don’t have the right network driver for the tablet. And apparently the drivers our Windows people have been able to find don’t load into RIS in a way we can use them easily.

So now I’m down to three options:

1) Use an SD card to somehow load an OS in a way that I can load the network drivers and bootstrap the rest of the install
2) Use a large USB key or USB hard drive to see if that will boot. IIRC, I think we tried this and had problems, that’s why I went with the SD card first.
3) Install Linux.

Thing is, I don’t have an SD card. Could I borrow one from someone to see if that would help us image this? I don’t think it needs to be large - 512M is probably good enough, or maybe smaller. Or, you know, if you have a 2G+ USB key, I could try that too.

The Linux thing was more a joke, because the only tablet piece I really use is OneNote, and I wouldn’t want to permanently do without that. But the XP installation on it right now is so rotten/decrepit that it’s almost unusuable. If Linux were quick and snappy, I could probably get away with running that (yikes, even on a laptop) for my normal tasks than dealing with my lame XP — at least until the reimage is resolved. And with spring break starting after Wednesday for me, I have until the 26th when I’d “need” to use OneNote again.

Reinstalling XP (or Vista) shouldn’t be this difficult!

I like that the City of Champaign has so much information online. Over lunch I was able to report a drainage problem in my neighborhood to the Public Works department. There’s a storm sewer on my walk route that’s higher than the road around it, so water puddles — unfortunately right in front of the sidewalk. Yesterday, while jumping over the puddle, I slid on the ice and landed ankle-deep in a mud puddle. Ew. Hopefully, that’ll patch that up soon so it’s no longer a problem.

I also, in my old-man-crankiness, I was able to send a message to the Champaign police about people speeding in my neighborhood. Apparently, this is a FAQ, since they setup a traffic concerns web form. Also, in my searching, I found a procedure to petition the city to change the speed limit in residential areas, but we’ll see if some greater enforcement (or the YOUR SPEED IS automated signs I hope they deploy around my neighborhood for a few weeks,) works first.

So Bissell is doing this Most valuable pet photo contest where you can win vacuums. I heard about it through the DTCCC lists, and I entered a photo of Merle (actually one of Andrew’s photos of him - thanks Andrew!)

Go vote for Merle! Voting runs March 11 through 18th.

I paged through over a hundred different photos this week, and I don’t think I’ll win, but it’s worth a shot. There are some cute dogs in this week’s voting period!