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In Search of the "Perfect" Pager Rotation?
jSpectre asks: "At my new job the Unix SA team has increased from 5 to 7. We're trying to work out a new, rotating on-call schedule and everyone has 'perfect' but conflicting ideas. Twelve weeks on and 6 off, 25 weeks on and 10 off. I thought someone out there must have come up with the perfect formula given N number of people you could rotate through the weekdays and weekend most efficiently. My google and web searches have come up with nothing. Does anyone know of a good formula/solution? The requirements are this, we have 7 people (but the forumla should ideally apply to N people) who should rotate through the weekdays (a 24 hour period) and the weekend (a 48 hour period). There is a desginated primary and a secondary person. They should be on for a few weeks and off entirely for a few. Sound like a good thesis/research problem for someone? By the way, Google comes up with a lot of people's schedules if you search for pager rotation. Tisk tisk."
Hmmm - maybe we're onto something . . . ;>
/. editors keep posting questions from real people with real jobs asking about help with their real jobs. Penis envy?
...don't worry about pager rotations because our datacenters never have failures, you insensitive clod!
I want to win the Powerball® jackpot which is estimated at $250 million.
Does anyone know of a good formula/solution? The requirements are this, I want to win this Powerball® jackpot (but the forumla should ideally apply such that out of the N times I play, I should win at least N-1 times). Sound like a good thesis/research problem for someone? By the way, Google comes up with a lot of pages if you search for lucky Powerball® numbers. Tisk tisk.
I've found that the best rotation is the everyone-gets-paged-and-if-you-don't-see-it-fixed- within-a-few-minutes-find-a-terminal rotation.
I like to use Buzz word bingo to select the next victim. Today "Beowulf cluster" is an instant critical hit.
Or try These
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
For example, let's say you have N people working (and all are interchaingable, to start with). That means that each of them should be on call for K = 1000/N milliseconds out of every second (on average). Provided there are less than 500 people to be scheduled, you can accomplish this by rounding K to an integer (for the case where there are more that 500 people to be scheduled, either schedule them for one millisecond each, or go to a finer grained time-base). One important point to remember is that you must resource lock the call to the person in << K ms to avoid race conditions (which can garble text messages and result in an annoying high-pitched noise if two or more people try to return the call simultainiously and get multiplexed--
Hot damn, my run just finished.
G'night all...
-- MarkusQ
Humorous intent? And I thought -my- sense of humor was dry!
That was me, and I was stealing the once used tapes for use at home. I figured you would have caught on when I started swearing up and down that we shouldn't reuse memory DIMMs, Hard Drives, CPUs, by the time I had you convinced that we shouldn't reuse Monitors it was all over but the crying.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer