I've learned much in three years. Like I said,
it ain't great but it's a start. (By the way,
most of your suggestions are based on style and
not fact. There's a big difference between style
and spelling.)
I don't do much hiring. However, since my boss
is fairly new to the company, she had me review
the resumes for my new peer. I can't even begin
to tell you how poor those resumes were.
Strike one: if you've run your resume off on
the office copy machine, it's poorly reproduced,
not on heavy paper and is not square, I ain't
going to read it.
Strike two: if your resume has spelling errors,
grammatical errors or typos, you're toast. I am
a lousy speller, make more typos than I care to
admit and use the word 'ain't' often but I'm damn
sure going to have a few eyes check my resume
before I send it out.
Strike three: keep it to a single page no matter
what. If you want to add some color, slap a short
cover letter on the front. I don't care about your
hobbies or where you went to high school.
Of the 43 or so resumes I saw, 29 were taken
out of the running based on the above criteria.
Here are a few additional resume tips...
* Bullet items are good. Paragraphs are bad.
* Don't put jobs on your resume that lasted
fewer than six months. This is especially true
if you've got a string of them. A few people
(had they not gotten the above three strikes)
would have been taken out of the running because
the had a string of jobs that lasted three to
eight months each. (And the person wasn't a
contractor.) It takes longer than three months
to get an employee up to speed even in the best
of shops. Why would an employer even consider
such a short-timer? I know I wouldn't.
* Don't mention salary on your resume. It
won't help you and stands a good chance of
hurting you. If you set it too high, you won't
even be considered for the position. If you
set it too low, you're may not get what you're
worth or even what they are willing to pay.
The chances of your request being what they
have in mind is slim at best. (In fact, don't
discuss salary till an offer is on the table.)
* References are a double-edge sword. I tend
to suggest folks leave them off the basic resume
but make them available on request. Not only
does this shorten the length of the resume, it
gives you another opportunity to interact with
the interviewer. When you get the call asking
for references, make sure you ask the person
what type of reference they would like (peer,
supervisor, character, subordinate, etc.). Also,
When I call a reference, it is to confirm what I
already know for the most part. If I have a bad
feeling about someone, I'll call. If I have a
great feeling about a candidate, I'll call. If
I have no feelings one way or another, a
reference isn't going to do me much good.
* While important to grab one's attention,
do it in a classy fashion. High quality paper
with water marks is good. Glitter glued to the
printed bullets is bad. Construction paper, if
done right, is good. Fluorescent green paper
is bad.
* I don't care that you were employee of the
month in August 1998. If you got a Creativity
and Innovation award because you saved the
company $27,000, list it.
If you want to see a resume that was headed in
the right direction but isn't there yet, you can
check out
my
resume from three years ago. Since I've got a
job, I haven't spent any time updating it. (Yes,
it's in PDF format. That's far better than the
MS Word or even Word Perfect formats I often see.)
You've got a UPS, right? (If not, why not?)
Why not make your own power strips? It's less
expensive, more flexiable and you get exactly
what you want. The UPS will provide all the
surge protection you need.
In January, I moved out of my apartment and into
a house. It always bugged me that my UPS added a bunch of heat and
noise to my home office. So, I put it in the garage, gave it its own breaker and wired the
computer room the way God intended.
The UPS has better surge and slump protection
than I could ever get from any surge protector.
By doing my own wireing, I've got the outlets
prefectly spaced and at the right height for
both my desk and work bench.
The parts are very cheap and everything is
easy to put together so long as you have a basic
understanding of how electricity works and some
screwdriver skills.
I don't understand why a retail establishment would allow this sort of practice
That's an easy one... the printer company
offers the store a higher margin in exchange
for the dude talking up the printers. There is
no down side for the store.
The store gets a free employee who actually
knows something about the product he is
attempting to sell. The store might get 10% of
the selling price instead of 7%. The printer
company doesn't have to worry that the store's
poorly trained sales staff is costing them
customer. By selling more units, the increased
margin and FTE is more than worth the cost.
As another noted, this has been going on in
stores (from food to automotive to hardware) for decades if not longer. All told, I don't have a
problem with the practice. I'll take a sharp
comporate shill over a brain dead computer stock
boy any day of the week.
I wish I had some good answers for you but I
don't. I just moved into my first house and
have been working toward solar power. Living
in Central Florida, we have plenty of sun to
spare. (Wind, too, but I'm sure the neighbors
would be unhappy with a 75-foot tower in the
backyard.) The question now is what am I going
to do with it.
I've replaced all my incandescent lights with
fluorescent. (You'll be amazed at how much
flourescent lighting will save you each month.
Not only does it use fewer watts, it doesn't
produce nearly as much heat). I've made sure
there is plenty of insulation. I'm getting rid
of the electric water heater and putting in a
solar version. The 15-year-old electric dryer
is being replaced with a natural gas version
(yes, gas is expensive but it's not nearly as
pricy as electrons). There are also a few more
appliances (all over ten years old) I'd like
to replace but I've already blown my monetary
wads so to speak.
I've been reading
HomePower
for inspiration and ideas. While building a
solar system from scratch sounds like the best
way to go about it, what I really want is a kit
being that this will be my first attempt. I want
parts I know will work together and a clear path
to setting everything up.
There are a number of places that sell
solar power kits but none look, er, reputable. I
have no reason to believe they aren't but they
certainly look as though they are run out of
someone's basement. If would be great if I could walk
into a local showroom and talk to someone.
I like the configuration you are proposing
and your usage isn't too far out of line.
(I've gotten down to 7.5 KW a day.) Most of
what I've heard about Trace and Siemens is
good. They both have a very loyal following.
Make sure you check out the DOE's Million Solar Roofs web site. There is lots
of good information there. Specifically, they have
a state-by-state incentive guide that tells
what incentives are available from where and how
to get your system subsidized by any number of
public and private groups.
Good luck. Once you get your system up and
working, I'd love for SlashDot to follow-up
with you.
I can't believe that your bottleneck is the
ethernet connection itself. You say that you've
topped out at two megabytes per second
but I think you probably meant two megabits
per second. That's a big difference.
For just a moment, let's assume you were right
and the NIC in your box or your port is slowing
you down. I agree with ATS
that chances are you won't see a speed increase
by adding a port since you're probably going to
be hitting the same hub/switch. If you've got a
100mbps NIC and connection and are just hitting
2Mbps (or even 2MBps for that matter), your
connection is the the bottleneck. The problem is
further up stream.
Chances are, the university's internet
connection is your bottleneck. Ask your college
how phat a pipe they've got and work the math
back from there.
The only other situation I can see where
adding another port would help you is if the
dorm ports are bandwidth limited at the switch.
If that's the case, The Man might have his
jackboot on your neck. If that's the case,
adding a second line will free you.
The technical details of this quest are best
left to the student.
And how are they going to achieve TBs with 18 GB drives??
Can you really not do the math?
1000gb divided by 18gb seems to 56 (rounded up)
drives. Double that since it's mirrored. That's
112 drives. An IBM SSA array (7133-040) holds 16
drives. That comes to seven drawers.
We've got 148 drives (mostly 4.5gb and 9gb
since we're a smaller shop) online in a similar
SSA configuration.
Of course, if the row size is substantial
(binary objects such as images), it may make
sense to use larger drives. However, if the
data is primary textual in nature (ie: small),
keep with the relatively small drives.
That entire statement assumes that you have
a pretty much unlimited budget, and free reign
to do your job.
You are a nay-sayer. You say 'nay'.
Everyone is constrained by budgets and
management. However, once again, it's up to
the system administrator as part of the job
to sell management on redundant systems. I
would be failing the shareholders (for my
prime job is to enhance shareholder value)
if I did anything less.
Budgets and management are an excuse for
lazy administrators. It is substantially
more work for me to write the business cases
and sell capital appropriation requests (CARs)
that are more expensive thanks to fault
tolerance. However, that's my job.
One of the places many novice administrators
make mistakes is in being unable to say 'no,
we can't do it for less'. Many will, in an
effort to get any hardware in the building,
will cut specs to the bone in a very short-sided
attempt to impress the boss. That's shooting
one's self in the foot and I swear that will
come back to haunt you. (Can I get an 'amen'?)
When you need a fault-tolerent, four-processor
RS/6000 with two gig of RAM to get the job done
right, don't let management cut your spares,
halve your processors and RAM. If they do that,
reliability will suffer as will as performance.
The end result is that you will look bad even
if it was the boss that was swinging the ax.
Yes, there are cases where the world is not
perfect and you don't get everything. My job
is to make those cases few and far between.
Several people have suggested laptops, wireless
toys and remote management tools. Those people,
while they have their heart in the right place,
are prisoners. When one's first reaction to your
question is 'how do I get net access from a
tropical island?', there's a big problem.
I've said this many times before on Slashdot
(and I'd link to my earlier comments but
Slashdot eats old comments) and I'm going to
say it once more... If you can't leave town for
two weeks and not have your company survive,
you are a lousy system administrator.
For many years, I was much like you. I never
wanted to leave town for two reasons. First, I
was afraid that the system would fall into
pieces and I'd be needed. My second worry was
that it wouldn't I wouldn't. (And, if nothing
broke, what value did I bring to the company?)
Now, I understand that point one was related to
my novice abilities as an administrator and ego
The second point was fear and lack of ego.
Part of my job as a senior unix systems administrator -- if not the main part of my
job -- is to make sure that I am irrelevant.
It's my job to create redundant systems
such that any single failure won't interrupt
production. It's my job to ensure that every
problem is documented so that someone else
with less experience can fix it the next time
around. It's my job to make sure that, whenever
possible, regular problems are self-fixing (ie:
programming is tweaked and processes are
automatically restarted when they die). It is
my job to make sure that someone other than me
(in my case, the help desk) knows how to fix
all reoccuring issues that can't be handled
with automation.
Today, I can leave town without worry. I still
keep a laptop in the trunk with traveling and the
computer room has my cell phone number but I
very rarely have to use either.
The answer to your question is that you need
to spend a couple months working up procedures,
writing documentation and grooming a lackey.
Once you have done that, take a couple weeks off.
Bring your electronic toys just in case. But, if
you have done your job, you won't need them.
When I see questions like this on Slashdot,
I get chills. This is obviously a big-budget
job and yet the guy responsible for the
project seems to be asking some very basic --
too basic -- questions. Honestly, this isn't
a flame. I've been in that boat myself from
time to time. However, before I'd every consider
holding myself up to public ridicule, I'd do
some heavy research. (And hope the boss never
finds out. {grin})
Anyway, don't even consider RAID5. That'll
be double-dog slow. You need to go mirrored.
Yes, that's more expensive. However, I can't
imagine a database vendor recommending anything
but mirrored. Actually, Oracle says folks
should use RAID 0+1 which is mirrored stripes.
We don't but our system was setup before that
was the recommendation.
In terms of drive size, the more spindles
you have the better. That means, buy nine-gig,
not 80-gig, drives. Of course, with your sizing
requirements, you may buy 18-gig drives instead.
However, my advice still stands. More spindles
is more speed.
Drive technology will be determined by what
vendor you choose. We're an IBM shop and use
SSA drives exclusively for our RS/6000 systems.
It's fast, allows multiple paths (up to eight)
to each drive and allows for easy clustering.
Since you will have a large amount of drives,
it's more important to have multiple paths to
each drive than a single ultra-fast backbone.
(Ie: sharing 120 mbps across 40 drives isn't
as good as sharing 40mbps across groups of
10 drives.)
As a shareholder of EMC, I highly recommend
their products. They are the best bar none. If
you are a big player (Wal-Mart, Charles Schwab,
etc.), their cost isn't much more than a less
qualified solution. (Of course, I don't think
you'll be a big enough player to get the really
good discounts.)
Overall, the best advice I've seen in this
thread is to ask your database vendor what you
need to buy. Oracle|Sybase|IBM wants you to have
a good database experience and will not give you
bad advice on the hardware front. In fact,
Oracle (who I most often work with) can sometimes
help you to get bigger discount (no one ever pays
list price) out of IBM|Sun|DEC.
You're in over your head. Make sure you follow
the George W. game plan and get yourself some
fine advisors.
I've got an IBM 600E ThinkPad (which replaced
my 770). With it I bought an awesome docking
station for less than your PCMCIA to PCI
adapater.
The docking station has three PCI slots,
two external drive bays, one internal bay,
all ports (USB, serial, parallel, keyboard,
mouse, audio, etc.) replicated, two more
PCMCIA slots and SCSI built in.
Summary: it rocks!
People mock me because I spent a bit more
money to buy an IBM ThinkPad and a bit more pm
top of that to buy a docking station. Those
same people, however, constantly have laptop
problems, lack expandibility, have no upgrade
path and are generally unhappy. But, they saved
a few hundred bucks.
This advice is mostly directed at those who
don't have laptops yet; the rest of you are
probably already screwed. When you buy a laptop, don't go cheap. But an IBM ThinkPad. Trust me.
LiLo executes once every 50 to 180 days for me. It ain't pretty but who cares? It's there, it works and I never have to touch it. It has been in production on some of my systems for nearly three years.
If I was installing a new system and I knew someone who had orgasimed over something other than LiLo, I might look at it. But probably not.
LiLo works.
Something that works beats something
that is cool nine times out of ten.
For 16 hours Wednesday, over 400 of our users
were without their email. We have three clustered
Exchange servers. Together they serve around
1,400 users. The machine we lost had an eight
gig message database that got corrupted. This is
what I see in the daily report about the issue...
WEDNESDAY 11/15/2000
midnight-16:19 Problems still are experienced in
the exchange database. Victor and Rui reported
massive database corruption. @06:00 a restore was
started. There is a estimated downtime from 06:00
approximately two hours. @07:02 Victor sent an
Ad-Hoc to all support groups. Groups that will
be affected are Tech Services, Systems,
Operations (including Press), TI, Administration,
and HR. (14:00) FYI - Ernie, Jim and Tim are
aware of the situation. (16:19) Email was
available again. Was advised by Alex that FYIs
would be sent out by the Office group.
Exchange is putting way too many eggs in one
basket if you ask me. For fractions of what we
spend on Exchange, you could buy some hardcore
sendmail action. A single database to corrupt
instead of individual mbox files seems silly.
(Yes, I know there are reasons why databases are
cool. For mail, I feel more comfortable with old school tools.)
In 1995, the company I was working for built a
new building. Having used the other one for half
a century, we had grand ideas about what we were
going to do right this time.
We pulled two four-pair CAT5 cables to every
single desk or place where we tought there might
possibly be a desk. One cable was for voice and
the other data. With that, we could have four
analog phone lines at every desk and two network
connections (we were running 10mbps to the
desktop so splitting a four-pair for two
connections was within spec). At the time, that's
more than we ever thought we would ever need. We
also pulled multiple CAT5 drops to each and every
conference and storage room.
Each end of each of the flour floors had a
wireing closet at the end. Planning on expansion,
we ran 12(!) strands of fiber to each closet.
Before the building was even finished, we doubled
the amount of fiber in each closet and put
interduct (conduit) everywhere we thought we
might possibly want more later.
By 1998, most desktops were upgraded to 100mbps
and most all of our expansion capacity was gone.
We had survived this long using splitters to run
two drops down the same physical cable. When we
went 100mbps, that was no longer technically
allowed. (Though, for short drops, it caused no
errors according to our fancy test equipment.)
Now, just five years after moving into the
building, I understand they are working on a
plan to move some of the design desktops to
gigabit (the company is a newspaper, by the way)
ethernet. This will require much rewiring.
So, here's the lesson. Whatever you do, no matter
how well you plan, it's only going to last a few
years before you have to do it over again. My
advice to you is simple. By the best you can
afford of *today's* technology. Don't think you
can out-guess technology.
Wireless is cool. However, it will be another
couple years before it's ready for prime time.
Don't waste your money on it now. By the time
it's good, the stuff you've bought today will
not be work with the new standard. In the
meantime, you've spent a lot of money on
something that doesn't work well.
Fiber... You don't want it to the desktop. You
do want it for your backbone. The company I
currently work for decided to run a pair of
fiber to every desktop in the technology
division back in 1997. Fiber was ultra-hot and
there was a major remodeling project going on.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Here it
is the end of 2000 and not a single one of the
120 rops has ever had light shined through it.
The reason is simple... Fiber to the desktop is
too darn expensive. It was cheaper to upgrade
to 100mbps over copper than it was to put fiber
NICs in all the machines. Not even our servers
use fiber. Copper is just too cheap.
I won't say fiber will never make it to the
desktop but that's the way I'd bet over the
next five to seven years.
Buy the best copper you can afford. Make sure
all your network drops terminate in a large
wiring closet with plenty of cool air. Don't
buy cheap networking hardware. Make sure you
document everything. Plan on repeating this
process in three to five years.
There are dozens of industrial laptops on the
market that are waterproof (as much as anything
with excited electrons is waterproof) and rugged.
All of them will run on 12 volts. Power
consumption would be less than 25 watts if you
don't buy the latest and greatest model.
Since he was openly publishing this
information, he was acting as a journalist.
If I took out your appendix, would that make
me a doctor? No. If I installed Linux, would that
make me an open source advocate? No.
Give journalists just a bit more credit. Just
because some dude grabs some internal documents
and posts them doesn't make him a journalist.
Hell, even if he were a bonifide Washington Post
Watergate veteran, stealing is stealing. Were he
a journalist and he did steal internal documents,
he'd have no special protection from the law.
Shield laws only protect journalists from
revealing their sources. Shield laws don't give
us the right to break the law.
we will be needing some heavy metal along
the lines of an SMP Sun or SGI box. We need a
system that can support (at max) about 100
simultaneous users working on large image
files stored on the server.
The newspaper I work for has 75-85 ad builders
(30 or so a shift) working on Macs. They
regularly work with full page ads that are more
than 70 meg each (color doubletruck runs 230 meg
or so). For the past four years, they've been
using a single processor (486DX-66) Novell
server (hardware by Tricord) with 270 gig of
SCSI disk space and 512 meg of RAM. It has a
pair of 10mbps NICs. It has an uptime of more
than two years. This machine is probably half
of what you need. It's slow but rock solid.
We're replacing it before the end of the year
with a big IBM Netfinity with four PIII
processors, 320 gig of disk space, four 100mbps
NICs (one per ad subnet and a hot spare) and a
gig of RAM. I suspect that this would do what
you need it to do and then some.
We also need cataloging software that will allow
PC/Mac users to browse documents via thumbnails
and job numbers.
CCI's AdDesk is your overall solution.
We (the Orlando
Sentinel who I am not speaking for) have
used it for several years now. If you look at
the top 25 newspapers in the world, more than
half will be using CCI's products for either
Editorial or Advertising.
AdDesk ain't great but it's the best available
in terms of a full-featured, highly-expandable,
highly-customizable solution. It's built on top
of standard applications (Photoshop, Illustrator,
etc.) held together by common (Oracle, TCL, etc.)
running on either AIX or Solaris.
What do you guys think?
I think you have two choices. You can go cheap,
buy some heavy hardware and put an operating
system on it. Or, you can go with an AdDesk-like
solution, spend a bunch of money and have a real
advertising creation environment. It all depends
on the size of your budget.
I have YET to be involved in a project
that actually starts with the requirements
gathering.
I just finished a four-year project to
replace my newspaper's character-based
publishing system with a WYSIWYG full-page
layout solution. We spent eight months working
on a Project Specification Document (PSD) before
we laid down a single line of code.
The PSD was two volumes and over 700 pages.
From the moment it was written, it was misleading,
incomplete and, sometimes, downright inaccurate.
Even with its problems, it was one of the best
tools we had and I can't imagine doing a
project of any size without a blueprint. That
document kept us on track and often remided us
of stuff we otherwise would have forgotten.
Yes, I did say of any size. For small projects,
a line or two at the top of a script is enough.
As the scope increases, so should the blueprint.
I wouldn't want a contractor to build my house
without a plan but some folks do exactly that
when it comes to their software. Specifications?
We don't need to specifications.
Before I started my current job, my planning was
half-hearted if done at all. I mocked people who
would have meetings before starting a project. I
felt that the time saved by not planning and by
not holding meetings would more than cover any
extra time needed to fix small screw-ups along
the way.
The first few months I spent here were painful.
meetings every day. Documentation all over the
place. Very little 'work' actually getting done.
Three years later, I have a lot more respect for
doing things the right way.
The Open Source movement could greatly benefit
from more Open Planning. Right now, for all our
talk of openess, the organization is closed if
not the source. Could you imagine how many
more volunteers could get their hands dirty if
there was a list of things that needed to be done
and a roadmap as to how to get there?
If you are so vital to the company that
if you're not available when something goes
wrong the company will fail to be able to do
business... you are too vital.
There are two of me; me and a Bob unit.
For our mission-critical systems, we are
interchangeable. There are some specialized
areas of the system where one of us is clearly
better than the other but we both know enough
to keep the system running in a pinch.
Redundancy is only part of the no-call on-call
solution, however. Procedures and documentation
are my other tools.
In my environment, we have computer operators
but not a help desk. Our operators are trained
in customer support, take user support calls
and are low to mid-level technicians. They
computer room is staffed 24/7. Eventually,
they will become Matts and Bobs. In the meantime,
they answer stupid user calls, learn the systems
and fix what they can.
If I'm doing my job correctly, they should only
have to get me out of bed once an event. After
a problem develops, it is my responsibility to
either fix it so it never happens again or
document a workaround. Sometimes, both.
Thus, if tomorrow morning at 04:00 I get a
call because the widget got hung up and crashed
the dingbat, I've got to either prevent that from
every happening again, automate a response so
production is not affected or write a procedure
so that if it happens again, the operators can
fix it themselves.
Once again we're back to my original theory...
I am substantially in control of how often I
get paged on off-hours even though I'm required
to carry a pager 24/7. If I'm doing my job, I
don't get calls.
My guess is that I'm getting so much flack on
this issue because there are a lot of shops out
there were management has their heads in their
respective buttocks. I'm finding it hard to
believe that folks of our level are doing first
level support after hours. That's insane.
Further, I can't believe that in such a rabid
labor market folks are putting up with it.
Before the tech labor market goes flat (as
it's bound to sooner or later), y'all need to
find solid places to work. Sure, there are a
lot of places where you can get money firehosed
at you but are they really the best place to
work? I know I could double my salary by going
to a startup. However, I like where I'm at
because I don't have to put up with 20-30 pages
a week. I've got computer operators running
defense for me. I've got management that
understands that time, like money, is a resource
and it just doesn't magically appear.
If this thread does anything, I hope it opens
some eyes. From the sounds of things, there are
a lot of people out there getting screwed
rectally without the benefit of lubrication. If
you are one of those people, ask yourself if the
problem is the on-call schedule or the company.
If the answer is the latter, you better start
looking for a new company.
After 3 months of that crap, I quit in
infrustration!
As well you should have. I was working under
the assumption that folks in an unworkable
situation would move on to another job. What I
got from the author was that the rest of the job
was fine and the only problem was being on-call.
if you were stupid enough to provide pager
duty during your honeymoon - you deserve the
divorce you're probably headed for.
{grin} My wife, who works for the same company,
brought her pager, too. We were gone two weeks
and didn't get a single page. Before departure,
we each thought about the problems that might
arise in our respective departments and wrote
procedures so that pages wouldn't be needed.
Would you hire a plumber that wouldn't warranty
his work? If you spent $65,000 a year on a piece of software, wouldn't you want 24/7 support from
the vendor?
I take great pride in my ability to do my job
well. When I put together a server, I will stand
behind the work I've done. I'm responsible for
several mission-critical databases. If I have an
hour of downtime between 18:00 and 01:00, there
is a good chance that my newspaper will miss
publishing. We haven't missed a single newspaper
in 124 years.
We won't miss a day on my shift. My systems
will not be what causes us to break a 124-year
'uptime'.
I stand by my earlier statements. I don't
think any of us make minimum wage. If you're
not making more than $20 an hour and are
required to be on-call 24/7, maybe you have a
complaint. However, if you're a typical IT
worker grossing more than $40k and are
required to carry a pager, I don't think you
have a leg to stand on. It's part of your job.
If you are getting paged a lot such that it
is interrupting your life, you need to look
at what you can do to change the situation.
Are you being called about the same problem
over and over again? Do you have a procedure
the help desk can follow? Have you automated
failure detection and remediation? What have
you done to fix the problems? If you can't
change the situation, you may need to change
jobs.
I see a pager as a warranty. If you're not
willing to be on-call 24/7 to stand behind your
work, I'm not sure I want you working for me or
with me.
I've worked for a number of newspapers in
systems support. At all of them, I've been on
call 24/7. In the past eight years, there
hasn't been a single time that I didn't carry
a pager. That include weekends, vacations and
my honeymooon. During the day, I carry a two-way
radio and most of the time I've got a cell phone.
That's the nature of the beast.
I see the above as part of my job. The better
I do my job, the fewer pages I get. When systems
I'm responsible for break, it is my responsibility
to fix them. Period. If I'm doing my job right,
my after-hours calls are few and far between.
If you expect your mail server (Exchange, right? {grin}) to break 20 to 30 times a week, you are
not doing your job. Your system is unstable.
Your procedures are flawed. Your operators (or
whatever group handles daily maintenance) are
poorly trained. Something is horribly wrong.
That is your problem. Not the on-call schedule's.
If you want to look at worker abuse, look not
at the IT workers in your hospital, look at the
residents. It's not uncommon for residents to
work 80 hours or more a week. My aunt, a nurse,
tells me that 20-hour shifts are expected. It's
part of joining the Club Doctor.
My main reason for wanting to print my
own, was simply that my company will be moving
to a new address in a few months
Talk to your local printer. All the printers
I've worked with have been flexable. They
understand that businesses have printing needs and if they can do you a favor now, they'll get
your business later.
If only the address and phone number will
change between printings (not the graphics,
layout or the paper stock), you may be able to
talk him into a split run (half old info, half
new). If not, I'm pretty sure that he will cut
you a break on printing a second batch when
you move. The greatest cost in printing business
cards is the setup time not the raw materials. If
the setup is done, printing can be done cheap.
For the first time in while, I got stuck
interviewing job applicants and reviewing
loads of resumes.
Thirty-one of 53 people had laser-printed
business cards. These struck me as tacky.
They didn't feel right, some didn't fit in
my business card holder and many smeared.
Maybe I'm a business card bigot so take this
advice with a grain of salt... For crying out
loud, spend the $35 (or less), go to your local
printer and have professinally designed and
printed business cards.
I didn't nuke any of the candidates because
they had unprofessional cards but it was
certainly wasn't a point in their favor. All else
being equal, I'm going to hire the dude who
better presents himself because I believe that
he will also better represent the company.
Your mom might be impressed because you made
your business cards all by your little self but
I doubt those looking to hire you will.
InitZero
(Note to moderators: though this post may seem
to be of the troll variety, please file it under
'hard truth' or 'good advice'. Thanks.)
Cheaper than a PlayStation2 on Ebay: A maid, or at least a helper to come once a week and help me get my house in order,
One of the best things I ever did was get a
cleaning lady to come in every two weeks and do
the basic cleaning. I'm generally an orderly
person but that doesn't stop the dust from
building up, grease from sticking to the oven
and the toilet from getting the way toilets get.
I don't know where you're living but a
housekeeper in Orlando, FL costs $40 to $50 a
visit for a two bed/two bath apartment. That's
well below a PS/2 on eBay. I get visited every
two weeks for $80 a month.
A clean living space can help geeks to get
chicks, too! A clean house really impresses
the grrls. Nothing can ruin The Mood quicker
than a hottie heading to the bathroom to
'freashen up' only to find skid marks that
have been there since the Bush administration.
We just installed a 500 Gig RAID for US$20,000 for storing huge (and critical)
medical images.
Does that storage have a single point of failure?
It is mirrored? Is it SSA? Will it work on an RS/6000? Can it be backed up to ADSM/TSM?
All of these are critical questions for us. There
are many solutions that will hold a lot of data
for little cost. Take the 1U Maxtor box for example. At under
$5,000 for 320 gig, it sounds good. However, it
only has one NIC and doesn't support an SSA connection so we can't use it. It doesn't scale
well within our application environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I've learned much in three years. Like I said, it ain't great but it's a start. (By the way, most of your suggestions are based on style and not fact. There's a big difference between style and spelling.)
InitZero
I don't do much hiring. However, since my boss is fairly new to the company, she had me review the resumes for my new peer. I can't even begin to tell you how poor those resumes were.
Strike one: if you've run your resume off on the office copy machine, it's poorly reproduced, not on heavy paper and is not square, I ain't going to read it.
Strike two: if your resume has spelling errors, grammatical errors or typos, you're toast. I am a lousy speller, make more typos than I care to admit and use the word 'ain't' often but I'm damn sure going to have a few eyes check my resume before I send it out.
Strike three: keep it to a single page no matter what. If you want to add some color, slap a short cover letter on the front. I don't care about your hobbies or where you went to high school.
Of the 43 or so resumes I saw, 29 were taken out of the running based on the above criteria.
Here are a few additional resume tips...
* Bullet items are good. Paragraphs are bad.
* Don't put jobs on your resume that lasted fewer than six months. This is especially true if you've got a string of them. A few people (had they not gotten the above three strikes) would have been taken out of the running because the had a string of jobs that lasted three to eight months each. (And the person wasn't a contractor.) It takes longer than three months to get an employee up to speed even in the best of shops. Why would an employer even consider such a short-timer? I know I wouldn't.
* Don't mention salary on your resume. It won't help you and stands a good chance of hurting you. If you set it too high, you won't even be considered for the position. If you set it too low, you're may not get what you're worth or even what they are willing to pay. The chances of your request being what they have in mind is slim at best. (In fact, don't discuss salary till an offer is on the table.)
* References are a double-edge sword. I tend to suggest folks leave them off the basic resume but make them available on request. Not only does this shorten the length of the resume, it gives you another opportunity to interact with the interviewer. When you get the call asking for references, make sure you ask the person what type of reference they would like (peer, supervisor, character, subordinate, etc.). Also, When I call a reference, it is to confirm what I already know for the most part. If I have a bad feeling about someone, I'll call. If I have a great feeling about a candidate, I'll call. If I have no feelings one way or another, a reference isn't going to do me much good.
* While important to grab one's attention, do it in a classy fashion. High quality paper with water marks is good. Glitter glued to the printed bullets is bad. Construction paper, if done right, is good. Fluorescent green paper is bad.
* I don't care that you were employee of the month in August 1998. If you got a Creativity and Innovation award because you saved the company $27,000, list it.
If you want to see a resume that was headed in the right direction but isn't there yet, you can check out my resume from three years ago. Since I've got a job, I haven't spent any time updating it. (Yes, it's in PDF format. That's far better than the MS Word or even Word Perfect formats I often see.)
InitZero
You've got a UPS, right? (If not, why not?) Why not make your own power strips? It's less expensive, more flexiable and you get exactly what you want. The UPS will provide all the surge protection you need.
In January, I moved out of my apartment and into a house. It always bugged me that my UPS added a bunch of heat and noise to my home office. So, I put it in the garage, gave it its own breaker and wired the computer room the way God intended.
The UPS has better surge and slump protection than I could ever get from any surge protector. By doing my own wireing, I've got the outlets prefectly spaced and at the right height for both my desk and work bench.
The parts are very cheap and everything is easy to put together so long as you have a basic understanding of how electricity works and some screwdriver skills.
InitZero
I don't understand why a retail establishment would allow this sort of practice
That's an easy one... the printer company offers the store a higher margin in exchange for the dude talking up the printers. There is no down side for the store.
The store gets a free employee who actually knows something about the product he is attempting to sell. The store might get 10% of the selling price instead of 7%. The printer company doesn't have to worry that the store's poorly trained sales staff is costing them customer. By selling more units, the increased margin and FTE is more than worth the cost.
As another noted, this has been going on in stores (from food to automotive to hardware) for decades if not longer. All told, I don't have a problem with the practice. I'll take a sharp comporate shill over a brain dead computer stock boy any day of the week.
InitZero
I wish I had some good answers for you but I don't. I just moved into my first house and have been working toward solar power. Living in Central Florida, we have plenty of sun to spare. (Wind, too, but I'm sure the neighbors would be unhappy with a 75-foot tower in the backyard.) The question now is what am I going to do with it.
I've replaced all my incandescent lights with fluorescent. (You'll be amazed at how much flourescent lighting will save you each month. Not only does it use fewer watts, it doesn't produce nearly as much heat). I've made sure there is plenty of insulation. I'm getting rid of the electric water heater and putting in a solar version. The 15-year-old electric dryer is being replaced with a natural gas version (yes, gas is expensive but it's not nearly as pricy as electrons). There are also a few more appliances (all over ten years old) I'd like to replace but I've already blown my monetary wads so to speak.
I've been reading HomePower for inspiration and ideas. While building a solar system from scratch sounds like the best way to go about it, what I really want is a kit being that this will be my first attempt. I want parts I know will work together and a clear path to setting everything up.
There are a number of places that sell solar power kits but none look, er, reputable. I have no reason to believe they aren't but they certainly look as though they are run out of someone's basement. If would be great if I could walk into a local showroom and talk to someone.I like the configuration you are proposing and your usage isn't too far out of line. (I've gotten down to 7.5 KW a day.) Most of what I've heard about Trace and Siemens is good. They both have a very loyal following.
Make sure you check out the DOE's Million Solar Roofs web site. There is lots of good information there. Specifically, they have a state-by-state incentive guide that tells what incentives are available from where and how to get your system subsidized by any number of public and private groups.
Good luck. Once you get your system up and working, I'd love for SlashDot to follow-up with you.
InitZero
I can't believe that your bottleneck is the ethernet connection itself. You say that you've topped out at two megabytes per second but I think you probably meant two megabits per second. That's a big difference.
For just a moment, let's assume you were right and the NIC in your box or your port is slowing you down. I agree with ATS that chances are you won't see a speed increase by adding a port since you're probably going to be hitting the same hub/switch. If you've got a 100mbps NIC and connection and are just hitting 2Mbps (or even 2MBps for that matter), your connection is the the bottleneck. The problem is further up stream.
Chances are, the university's internet connection is your bottleneck. Ask your college how phat a pipe they've got and work the math back from there.
The only other situation I can see where adding another port would help you is if the dorm ports are bandwidth limited at the switch. If that's the case, The Man might have his jackboot on your neck. If that's the case, adding a second line will free you.
The technical details of this quest are best left to the student.
InitZero
And how are they going to achieve TBs with 18 GB drives??
Can you really not do the math?
1000gb divided by 18gb seems to 56 (rounded up) drives. Double that since it's mirrored. That's 112 drives. An IBM SSA array (7133-040) holds 16 drives. That comes to seven drawers.
We've got 148 drives (mostly 4.5gb and 9gb since we're a smaller shop) online in a similar SSA configuration.
Of course, if the row size is substantial (binary objects such as images), it may make sense to use larger drives. However, if the data is primary textual in nature (ie: small), keep with the relatively small drives.
InitZero
That entire statement assumes that you have a pretty much unlimited budget, and free reign to do your job.
You are a nay-sayer. You say 'nay'.
Everyone is constrained by budgets and management. However, once again, it's up to the system administrator as part of the job to sell management on redundant systems. I would be failing the shareholders (for my prime job is to enhance shareholder value) if I did anything less.
Budgets and management are an excuse for lazy administrators. It is substantially more work for me to write the business cases and sell capital appropriation requests (CARs) that are more expensive thanks to fault tolerance. However, that's my job.
One of the places many novice administrators make mistakes is in being unable to say 'no, we can't do it for less'. Many will, in an effort to get any hardware in the building, will cut specs to the bone in a very short-sided attempt to impress the boss. That's shooting one's self in the foot and I swear that will come back to haunt you. (Can I get an 'amen'?) When you need a fault-tolerent, four-processor RS/6000 with two gig of RAM to get the job done right, don't let management cut your spares, halve your processors and RAM. If they do that, reliability will suffer as will as performance. The end result is that you will look bad even if it was the boss that was swinging the ax.
Yes, there are cases where the world is not perfect and you don't get everything. My job is to make those cases few and far between.
InitZero
Several people have suggested laptops, wireless toys and remote management tools. Those people, while they have their heart in the right place, are prisoners. When one's first reaction to your question is 'how do I get net access from a tropical island?', there's a big problem.
I've said this many times before on Slashdot (and I'd link to my earlier comments but Slashdot eats old comments) and I'm going to say it once more... If you can't leave town for two weeks and not have your company survive, you are a lousy system administrator.
For many years, I was much like you. I never wanted to leave town for two reasons. First, I was afraid that the system would fall into pieces and I'd be needed. My second worry was that it wouldn't I wouldn't. (And, if nothing broke, what value did I bring to the company?) Now, I understand that point one was related to my novice abilities as an administrator and ego The second point was fear and lack of ego.
Part of my job as a senior unix systems administrator -- if not the main part of my job -- is to make sure that I am irrelevant.
It's my job to create redundant systems such that any single failure won't interrupt production. It's my job to ensure that every problem is documented so that someone else with less experience can fix it the next time around. It's my job to make sure that, whenever possible, regular problems are self-fixing (ie: programming is tweaked and processes are automatically restarted when they die). It is my job to make sure that someone other than me (in my case, the help desk) knows how to fix all reoccuring issues that can't be handled with automation.
Today, I can leave town without worry. I still keep a laptop in the trunk with traveling and the computer room has my cell phone number but I very rarely have to use either.
The answer to your question is that you need to spend a couple months working up procedures, writing documentation and grooming a lackey. Once you have done that, take a couple weeks off. Bring your electronic toys just in case. But, if you have done your job, you won't need them.
InitZero
As usual, rant first then opinion.
When I see questions like this on Slashdot, I get chills. This is obviously a big-budget job and yet the guy responsible for the project seems to be asking some very basic -- too basic -- questions. Honestly, this isn't a flame. I've been in that boat myself from time to time. However, before I'd every consider holding myself up to public ridicule, I'd do some heavy research. (And hope the boss never finds out. {grin})
Anyway, don't even consider RAID5. That'll be double-dog slow. You need to go mirrored. Yes, that's more expensive. However, I can't imagine a database vendor recommending anything but mirrored. Actually, Oracle says folks should use RAID 0+1 which is mirrored stripes. We don't but our system was setup before that was the recommendation.
In terms of drive size, the more spindles you have the better. That means, buy nine-gig, not 80-gig, drives. Of course, with your sizing requirements, you may buy 18-gig drives instead. However, my advice still stands. More spindles is more speed.
Drive technology will be determined by what vendor you choose. We're an IBM shop and use SSA drives exclusively for our RS/6000 systems. It's fast, allows multiple paths (up to eight) to each drive and allows for easy clustering. Since you will have a large amount of drives, it's more important to have multiple paths to each drive than a single ultra-fast backbone. (Ie: sharing 120 mbps across 40 drives isn't as good as sharing 40mbps across groups of 10 drives.)
As a shareholder of EMC, I highly recommend their products. They are the best bar none. If you are a big player (Wal-Mart, Charles Schwab, etc.), their cost isn't much more than a less qualified solution. (Of course, I don't think you'll be a big enough player to get the really good discounts.)
Overall, the best advice I've seen in this thread is to ask your database vendor what you need to buy. Oracle|Sybase|IBM wants you to have a good database experience and will not give you bad advice on the hardware front. In fact, Oracle (who I most often work with) can sometimes help you to get bigger discount (no one ever pays list price) out of IBM|Sun|DEC.
You're in over your head. Make sure you follow the George W. game plan and get yourself some fine advisors.
InitZero
I've got an IBM 600E ThinkPad (which replaced my 770). With it I bought an awesome docking station for less than your PCMCIA to PCI adapater.
The docking station has three PCI slots, two external drive bays, one internal bay, all ports (USB, serial, parallel, keyboard, mouse, audio, etc.) replicated, two more PCMCIA slots and SCSI built in. Summary: it rocks!
People mock me because I spent a bit more money to buy an IBM ThinkPad and a bit more pm top of that to buy a docking station. Those same people, however, constantly have laptop problems, lack expandibility, have no upgrade path and are generally unhappy. But, they saved a few hundred bucks.
This advice is mostly directed at those who don't have laptops yet; the rest of you are probably already screwed. When you buy a laptop, don't go cheap. But an IBM ThinkPad. Trust me.
InitZero
I'm serious.
LiLo executes once every 50 to 180 days for me. It ain't pretty but who cares? It's there, it works and I never have to touch it. It has been in production on some of my systems for nearly three years.
If I was installing a new system and I knew someone who had orgasimed over something other than LiLo, I might look at it. But probably not. LiLo works.
Something that works beats something that is cool nine times out of ten.
InitZero
For 16 hours Wednesday, over 400 of our users were without their email. We have three clustered Exchange servers. Together they serve around 1,400 users. The machine we lost had an eight gig message database that got corrupted. This is what I see in the daily report about the issue...
WEDNESDAY 11/15/2000 midnight-16:19 Problems still are experienced in the exchange database. Victor and Rui reported massive database corruption. @06:00 a restore was started. There is a estimated downtime from 06:00 approximately two hours. @07:02 Victor sent an Ad-Hoc to all support groups. Groups that will be affected are Tech Services, Systems, Operations (including Press), TI, Administration, and HR. (14:00) FYI - Ernie, Jim and Tim are aware of the situation. (16:19) Email was available again. Was advised by Alex that FYIs would be sent out by the Office group.
Exchange is putting way too many eggs in one basket if you ask me. For fractions of what we spend on Exchange, you could buy some hardcore sendmail action. A single database to corrupt instead of individual mbox files seems silly. (Yes, I know there are reasons why databases are cool. For mail, I feel more comfortable with old school tools.)
InitZero
In 1995, the company I was working for built a new building. Having used the other one for half a century, we had grand ideas about what we were going to do right this time.
We pulled two four-pair CAT5 cables to every single desk or place where we tought there might possibly be a desk. One cable was for voice and the other data. With that, we could have four analog phone lines at every desk and two network connections (we were running 10mbps to the desktop so splitting a four-pair for two connections was within spec). At the time, that's more than we ever thought we would ever need. We also pulled multiple CAT5 drops to each and every conference and storage room.
Each end of each of the flour floors had a wireing closet at the end. Planning on expansion, we ran 12(!) strands of fiber to each closet.
Before the building was even finished, we doubled the amount of fiber in each closet and put interduct (conduit) everywhere we thought we might possibly want more later.
By 1998, most desktops were upgraded to 100mbps and most all of our expansion capacity was gone. We had survived this long using splitters to run two drops down the same physical cable. When we went 100mbps, that was no longer technically allowed. (Though, for short drops, it caused no errors according to our fancy test equipment.)
Now, just five years after moving into the building, I understand they are working on a plan to move some of the design desktops to gigabit (the company is a newspaper, by the way) ethernet. This will require much rewiring.
So, here's the lesson. Whatever you do, no matter how well you plan, it's only going to last a few years before you have to do it over again. My advice to you is simple. By the best you can afford of *today's* technology. Don't think you can out-guess technology.
Wireless is cool. However, it will be another couple years before it's ready for prime time. Don't waste your money on it now. By the time it's good, the stuff you've bought today will not be work with the new standard. In the meantime, you've spent a lot of money on something that doesn't work well.
Fiber... You don't want it to the desktop. You do want it for your backbone. The company I currently work for decided to run a pair of fiber to every desktop in the technology division back in 1997. Fiber was ultra-hot and there was a major remodeling project going on. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Here it is the end of 2000 and not a single one of the 120 rops has ever had light shined through it. The reason is simple... Fiber to the desktop is too darn expensive. It was cheaper to upgrade to 100mbps over copper than it was to put fiber NICs in all the machines. Not even our servers use fiber. Copper is just too cheap.
I won't say fiber will never make it to the desktop but that's the way I'd bet over the next five to seven years.
Buy the best copper you can afford. Make sure all your network drops terminate in a large wiring closet with plenty of cool air. Don't buy cheap networking hardware. Make sure you document everything. Plan on repeating this process in three to five years.
Good luck. Networking is cool.
InitZero
There are dozens of industrial laptops on the market that are waterproof (as much as anything with excited electrons is waterproof) and rugged. All of them will run on 12 volts. Power consumption would be less than 25 watts if you don't buy the latest and greatest model.
InitZero
Since he was openly publishing this information, he was acting as a journalist.
If I took out your appendix, would that make me a doctor? No. If I installed Linux, would that make me an open source advocate? No.
Give journalists just a bit more credit. Just because some dude grabs some internal documents and posts them doesn't make him a journalist.
Hell, even if he were a bonifide Washington Post Watergate veteran, stealing is stealing. Were he a journalist and he did steal internal documents, he'd have no special protection from the law. Shield laws only protect journalists from revealing their sources. Shield laws don't give us the right to break the law.
InitZero
we will be needing some heavy metal along the lines of an SMP Sun or SGI box. We need a system that can support (at max) about 100 simultaneous users working on large image files stored on the server.
The newspaper I work for has 75-85 ad builders (30 or so a shift) working on Macs. They regularly work with full page ads that are more than 70 meg each (color doubletruck runs 230 meg or so). For the past four years, they've been using a single processor (486DX-66) Novell server (hardware by Tricord) with 270 gig of SCSI disk space and 512 meg of RAM. It has a pair of 10mbps NICs. It has an uptime of more than two years. This machine is probably half of what you need. It's slow but rock solid.
We're replacing it before the end of the year with a big IBM Netfinity with four PIII processors, 320 gig of disk space, four 100mbps NICs (one per ad subnet and a hot spare) and a gig of RAM. I suspect that this would do what you need it to do and then some.
We also need cataloging software that will allow PC/Mac users to browse documents via thumbnails and job numbers.
CCI's AdDesk is your overall solution. We (the Orlando Sentinel who I am not speaking for) have used it for several years now. If you look at the top 25 newspapers in the world, more than half will be using CCI's products for either Editorial or Advertising.
AdDesk ain't great but it's the best available in terms of a full-featured, highly-expandable, highly-customizable solution. It's built on top of standard applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.) held together by common (Oracle, TCL, etc.) running on either AIX or Solaris.
What do you guys think?
I think you have two choices. You can go cheap, buy some heavy hardware and put an operating system on it. Or, you can go with an AdDesk-like solution, spend a bunch of money and have a real advertising creation environment. It all depends on the size of your budget.
InitZero
I have YET to be involved in a project that actually starts with the requirements gathering.
I just finished a four-year project to replace my newspaper's character-based publishing system with a WYSIWYG full-page layout solution. We spent eight months working on a Project Specification Document (PSD) before we laid down a single line of code.
The PSD was two volumes and over 700 pages. From the moment it was written, it was misleading, incomplete and, sometimes, downright inaccurate. Even with its problems, it was one of the best tools we had and I can't imagine doing a project of any size without a blueprint. That document kept us on track and often remided us of stuff we otherwise would have forgotten.
Yes, I did say of any size. For small projects, a line or two at the top of a script is enough. As the scope increases, so should the blueprint.
I wouldn't want a contractor to build my house without a plan but some folks do exactly that when it comes to their software. Specifications? We don't need to specifications.
Before I started my current job, my planning was half-hearted if done at all. I mocked people who would have meetings before starting a project. I felt that the time saved by not planning and by not holding meetings would more than cover any extra time needed to fix small screw-ups along the way.
The first few months I spent here were painful. meetings every day. Documentation all over the place. Very little 'work' actually getting done. Three years later, I have a lot more respect for doing things the right way.
The Open Source movement could greatly benefit from more Open Planning. Right now, for all our talk of openess, the organization is closed if not the source. Could you imagine how many more volunteers could get their hands dirty if there was a list of things that needed to be done and a roadmap as to how to get there?
InitZero
If you are so vital to the company that if you're not available when something goes wrong the company will fail to be able to do business... you are too vital.
There are two of me; me and a Bob unit. For our mission-critical systems, we are interchangeable. There are some specialized areas of the system where one of us is clearly better than the other but we both know enough to keep the system running in a pinch.
Redundancy is only part of the no-call on-call solution, however. Procedures and documentation are my other tools.
In my environment, we have computer operators but not a help desk. Our operators are trained in customer support, take user support calls and are low to mid-level technicians. They computer room is staffed 24/7. Eventually, they will become Matts and Bobs. In the meantime, they answer stupid user calls, learn the systems and fix what they can.
If I'm doing my job correctly, they should only have to get me out of bed once an event. After a problem develops, it is my responsibility to either fix it so it never happens again or document a workaround. Sometimes, both.
Thus, if tomorrow morning at 04:00 I get a call because the widget got hung up and crashed the dingbat, I've got to either prevent that from every happening again, automate a response so production is not affected or write a procedure so that if it happens again, the operators can fix it themselves.
Once again we're back to my original theory... I am substantially in control of how often I get paged on off-hours even though I'm required to carry a pager 24/7. If I'm doing my job, I don't get calls.
My guess is that I'm getting so much flack on this issue because there are a lot of shops out there were management has their heads in their respective buttocks. I'm finding it hard to believe that folks of our level are doing first level support after hours. That's insane. Further, I can't believe that in such a rabid labor market folks are putting up with it.
Before the tech labor market goes flat (as it's bound to sooner or later), y'all need to find solid places to work. Sure, there are a lot of places where you can get money firehosed at you but are they really the best place to work? I know I could double my salary by going to a startup. However, I like where I'm at because I don't have to put up with 20-30 pages a week. I've got computer operators running defense for me. I've got management that understands that time, like money, is a resource and it just doesn't magically appear.
If this thread does anything, I hope it opens some eyes. From the sounds of things, there are a lot of people out there getting screwed rectally without the benefit of lubrication. If you are one of those people, ask yourself if the problem is the on-call schedule or the company. If the answer is the latter, you better start looking for a new company.
InitZero
After 3 months of that crap, I quit in infrustration!
As well you should have. I was working under the assumption that folks in an unworkable situation would move on to another job. What I got from the author was that the rest of the job was fine and the only problem was being on-call.
if you were stupid enough to provide pager duty during your honeymoon - you deserve the divorce you're probably headed for.
{grin} My wife, who works for the same company, brought her pager, too. We were gone two weeks and didn't get a single page. Before departure, we each thought about the problems that might arise in our respective departments and wrote procedures so that pages wouldn't be needed.
Would you hire a plumber that wouldn't warranty his work? If you spent $65,000 a year on a piece of software, wouldn't you want 24/7 support from the vendor?
I take great pride in my ability to do my job well. When I put together a server, I will stand behind the work I've done. I'm responsible for several mission-critical databases. If I have an hour of downtime between 18:00 and 01:00, there is a good chance that my newspaper will miss publishing. We haven't missed a single newspaper in 124 years.
We won't miss a day on my shift. My systems will not be what causes us to break a 124-year 'uptime'.
I stand by my earlier statements. I don't think any of us make minimum wage. If you're not making more than $20 an hour and are required to be on-call 24/7, maybe you have a complaint. However, if you're a typical IT worker grossing more than $40k and are required to carry a pager, I don't think you have a leg to stand on. It's part of your job.
If you are getting paged a lot such that it is interrupting your life, you need to look at what you can do to change the situation. Are you being called about the same problem over and over again? Do you have a procedure the help desk can follow? Have you automated failure detection and remediation? What have you done to fix the problems? If you can't change the situation, you may need to change jobs.
I see a pager as a warranty. If you're not willing to be on-call 24/7 to stand behind your work, I'm not sure I want you working for me or with me.
InitZero
I've worked for a number of newspapers in systems support. At all of them, I've been on call 24/7. In the past eight years, there hasn't been a single time that I didn't carry a pager. That include weekends, vacations and my honeymooon. During the day, I carry a two-way radio and most of the time I've got a cell phone. That's the nature of the beast.
I see the above as part of my job. The better I do my job, the fewer pages I get. When systems I'm responsible for break, it is my responsibility to fix them. Period. If I'm doing my job right, my after-hours calls are few and far between.
If you expect your mail server (Exchange, right? {grin}) to break 20 to 30 times a week, you are not doing your job. Your system is unstable. Your procedures are flawed. Your operators (or whatever group handles daily maintenance) are poorly trained. Something is horribly wrong. That is your problem. Not the on-call schedule's.
If you want to look at worker abuse, look not at the IT workers in your hospital, look at the residents. It's not uncommon for residents to work 80 hours or more a week. My aunt, a nurse, tells me that 20-hour shifts are expected. It's part of joining the Club Doctor.
InitZero
My main reason for wanting to print my own, was simply that my company will be moving to a new address in a few months
Talk to your local printer. All the printers I've worked with have been flexable. They understand that businesses have printing needs and if they can do you a favor now, they'll get your business later.
If only the address and phone number will change between printings (not the graphics, layout or the paper stock), you may be able to talk him into a split run (half old info, half new). If not, I'm pretty sure that he will cut you a break on printing a second batch when you move. The greatest cost in printing business cards is the setup time not the raw materials. If the setup is done, printing can be done cheap.
InitZero
For the first time in while, I got stuck interviewing job applicants and reviewing loads of resumes.
Thirty-one of 53 people had laser-printed business cards. These struck me as tacky. They didn't feel right, some didn't fit in my business card holder and many smeared.
Maybe I'm a business card bigot so take this advice with a grain of salt... For crying out loud, spend the $35 (or less), go to your local printer and have professinally designed and printed business cards.
I didn't nuke any of the candidates because they had unprofessional cards but it was certainly wasn't a point in their favor. All else being equal, I'm going to hire the dude who better presents himself because I believe that he will also better represent the company.
Your mom might be impressed because you made your business cards all by your little self but I doubt those looking to hire you will.
InitZero
(Note to moderators: though this post may seem to be of the troll variety, please file it under 'hard truth' or 'good advice'. Thanks.)
Cheaper than a PlayStation2 on Ebay: A maid, or at least a helper to come once a week and help me get my house in order,
One of the best things I ever did was get a cleaning lady to come in every two weeks and do the basic cleaning. I'm generally an orderly person but that doesn't stop the dust from building up, grease from sticking to the oven and the toilet from getting the way toilets get.
I don't know where you're living but a housekeeper in Orlando, FL costs $40 to $50 a visit for a two bed/two bath apartment. That's well below a PS/2 on eBay. I get visited every two weeks for $80 a month.
A clean living space can help geeks to get chicks, too! A clean house really impresses the grrls. Nothing can ruin The Mood quicker than a hottie heading to the bathroom to 'freashen up' only to find skid marks that have been there since the Bush administration.
By the way, my ultimate geek Christmas gift would be a 10 node, fully-functioning PDP11-based Atex publishing system. Call now! Supplies are limited.
InitZero
We just installed a 500 Gig RAID for US$20,000 for storing huge (and critical) medical images.
Does that storage have a single point of failure? It is mirrored? Is it SSA? Will it work on an RS/6000? Can it be backed up to ADSM/TSM?
All of these are critical questions for us. There are many solutions that will hold a lot of data for little cost. Take the 1U Maxtor box for example. At under $5,000 for 320 gig, it sounds good. However, it only has one NIC and doesn't support an SSA connection so we can't use it. It doesn't scale well within our application environment.
InitZero