August 31st, 2004 yoshers
So school has started again at the University of California, Berkeley and in some ways my job will actually be less hectic because of that. Aside from the previous server crashing issues, things have been going pretty smoothly. I have managed to setup a new server and migrate (without too much headache) our home page from the temporary location (which was a development area for one of the groups in my department).
Also, I have managed to help with setting up the environment (and negotiating with another department, as they are hosting the server) on time for our Grade Book Pilot. As the name suggests, this is an application for professors, instructors, and graduate student instructors to input grades so that they will be able to keep track of it in a centralized location. It does offer many different options (curves, drop assignment, curve one test only, etc.) for the grader to choose from so it is pretty customizable to suit each grader’s needs. It is actually going to be a part of a larger project called SAKAI, which is an open source course management system. So now the fun begins as I will have to setup SAKAI on our development server.
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August 17th, 2004 yoshers
I guess part of the fun of working as a systems administrator is to recover from a server disaster such as having random parts of your RAID 1 (mirrored hard drives) hard drives erased so that the machine does not boot and personal data be erased. Of course, it would not have been so painful had we had a real backup plan. Unfortunately, I had just started to do some basic backup to a central server when this happened. And further unfortunately, since I was using some old scripts, the backed up data were erased Monday morning as in my old workplace, we would have had the data backed up to tape on Friday. Anyways, at least the critical data did not get erased.
The really fun part was trying to bring our trouble ticket system back online. We use Double Choco Latte (DCL), an open source product, which we had to make many changes in order to make it work with our system. Of course, since this is not documented and the knowledge lives in one person’s head, it was quite a challenge to bring it back online. It goes to show how open source is not always the answer, but it still beats paying $7,000 to get something else that does not work.
So now things are mostly back to normal. We also found out that to recover data from the hard drive would take $10,000+, so since it is not exactly critical data that we need, I think we will be passing on this one. So the lesson of the month is…do your backups!
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August 1st, 2004 yoshers
- Nod and smile
- Stay quiet and away from family drama, even if it is happening right in front of you and you are being dragged into the fight
- Make a good first impression and be very hospitable if they are at your place
- Go out of your way, even if it is just to go and show yourself at an outing
Posted in Yoshi's Advisory Column | Comments Off
