Work Computers
Boot camp is not a new thing, but every time I see it, I have to do a double take.
Same site New look
Sat, 2009-09-12 09:56 | by Erin
I have always believed in hosting my own site.
I have always had my own server, because I never wanted to be at the mercy of someone else's poorly designed and poorly executed system. Things have been difficult though at the location where I am currently hosting my server, and I thought it was time to move on.
I work for a ISP as well and I wanted to host my services here at work there was no English support, so I decided to look else where. I found hostgator while working with a friend on his site. I had a look at his control panel and the features they offered and though I should give it a try.
I honestly have never been more pleased with a purchase in my life.
Every thing just worked, and when I encountered a problem. Like I could not load my sql file for my database, I contacted tech support.
I have always had my own server, because I never wanted to be at the mercy of someone else's poorly designed and poorly executed system. Things have been difficult though at the location where I am currently hosting my server, and I thought it was time to move on.
I work for a ISP as well and I wanted to host my services here at work there was no English support, so I decided to look else where. I found hostgator while working with a friend on his site. I had a look at his control panel and the features they offered and though I should give it a try.
I honestly have never been more pleased with a purchase in my life.
Every thing just worked, and when I encountered a problem. Like I could not load my sql file for my database, I contacted tech support.
Me: Hi! Is there a way I can get a command line interface to the mysql server on my virtual host?
Tech Support: Did you try to ssh to the site and use the command line tools?
Me: A no can I do that?
Tech Support: Sure do you want to enable ssh?
Me: Yes please.
Tech Support: OK ssh is enabled.
Me: Thank you.
9 months of my life PART 2
Wed, 2008-09-17 21:43 | by Erin
There were many aspects of the project that I was very detached from. Like billing. Frequently while I was setting up for the next set of upgrades I would be approached with billing questions. I simply was not involved in billing decisions and while I had made my "advice" known I know no one cared what I said it was the smile and nod parade as they went past my desk on the way to the meeting I was not invited to.
Later this became OK with me, as unfortunate as it may be, I learned to accept the Japanese way. Meetings are so superiors can tell inferiors what to do. Formally. Very little real "working things out happen there", mostly it was you do this and you do that.
As a constant student of people, and knowledge of my own persona abilities and handicaps, I learned ways around this. I would catch managers in the hall and chat to them politely about the situation and try to get their opinions on what then wanted and needed done. Then after understanding the problem, I would either offer a host of solutions or step back and try to find a solution, only to return later to the same person with a sorted solution in the hallway or over lunch or in the smoking area ... even though I do not smoke, to get what the engineering side wanted, and what make the business side needed happen.
Death of the old... servers.
Thu, 2007-09-27 10:43 | by Erin
I have written in the past about the set of old old servers that I maintain. It is not always easy to keep things that went out of warranty 6 years ago up and running. This weekend we had something called a "teidenn" basically they turned off the power to the entire building to preform some maintenance on the power system of the building.
When the power gets turned off, so do all the servers. So from about 7 am a co-worker and I began powering off servers. This was the easy part. We went our seperate ways and waited for the Building manager to call us back and say the power was back on.
When he did that is when the fun began. We arrived and there were still 2 guys from the power firm working on 1 plug in our building. I made myself busy by switching on machines and logging into the console server and trying to get them to start. The list of problems evolved from there beginning with the fact that I had left the root password list at the office. With most of the machines needing disc maintenance and/or fsck. It was not a good start.
After the acquisition of the passwords most things rolled along nicely with a few exceptions, One server that held a few servers specialized functions would not start, completely dead. To complicate matters further there was no "easy" replacement for that server and I was stuck as for what to do with it. Another server was extremely fickle and kept pushing an impossible amount of errors to the terminal. A few break commands and a quick re-mount of the /usr slice and it was back in action.
All in all we were there till about 8 pm and when I left there was still one server down. I skipped rugby practice and went to the "Data Center" and tried my best to get the server up and running up again to no avail. A whole day wasted for just one server. ERRRRRR I do not mind this is my job, but every year we say .... "dont worry we will be out of here by next year" and we never are. Next year I hope that we are right, but we probably wont be.
