Die Hard VII: Sysadmin
Excellent.
Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday frolic through readers' memories of jobs gone bad. This week, meet “John” who once worked for a construction company that printed its payroll checks every Thursday afternoon. “If the cheques were not ready early on Friday morning, the superintendents were more than willing to give the …
"You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
What century is it now again? I'm sure the first* film started with "Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away..."
*For the record, I quite liked the fourth film, which came out recently. That was quite a loooong wait after Return of the Jedi for the next Star Wars movie. Changing the subject slightly, is there ever going to be a sequel to The Matrix?
AC you are in space ... just the wrong franchise - and now in it's full nerdness-
"The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." - Captain Jean-Luc Picard, First Contact
Off now to fix some stinking COW on a Friday!
> is there ever going to be a sequel to The Matrix?
Errm, I knew there was one, but a quick surf shows there are two. However, I'm sure you can guess why you've never heard of them:). How come you haven't come to dread the prospect of sequels, do you long for disappointment that badly?
Note: a well thought out series is not a set of sequels in the Hollywood sense.
I echo the 'whoosh', you're missing subtext.
There is only one Matrix film.
There is one Highlander film (two if you're being generous).
One Hobbit film
Six Batman films
Two Terminator films
Three X-Men films (maybe four)
Contentiously I recognise five Star Wars films..
"You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th Century"
Tsk tsk tsk. The push to go "cashless" isn't for the benefit of the consumer or seller. It's because cash transactions don't have middlemen between the seller & buyer taking a cut of the transaction. The push for a "cashless" society is driven by bankers & payment handlers wanting cuts of every transaction on the planet, and simply drives up the sellers costs & prices for the buyer.
Why do we never get to see the payroll clerks on Death Star
[breathes heavily]
My lightsaber is tax deductible!
[breathes heavily]
What do you mean you're going to have to put me on hold? I've already been forced to listen to the Imperical March for 25 minutes!
[breathes heavily]
Can I speak to your supervisor... No, do not put me on hold... Hello! Hello?
[breathes heavily]
Admiral, move the Deathstar to Alderaan.
No, I don't care if the rebel base is on Hoth, the tax office is on Alderaan!
According to the Call Girl Principle: the value of a service is always greater before it is received than after.
"John" should have let the company owner know that there was no way he could get those cheques printed by the next day with the infrastructure that he'd been provided with. And then gone and fixed it anyway. Same outcome but framed completely differently.
And the company owner might have given a lot more thought to avoid this sort of thing in the future, + provide some decent DR infrastructure rather than just "Meh, that's what I pay you for"
Do you mind a little advice? Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want.
Yeah, well, I told the Captain I'd have this analysis done in an hour.
How long will it really take?
An hour.
Och, lad. You didn't tell him how long it would *really* take, did ya?
Well, of course I did.
Oh, laddie. You've got a lot to learn if you want people to think of you as a miracle worker.
That was, by far, my favorite episode of TNG. It's a shame Scotty didn't stick around on the Big E-D; not necessarily as a main cast member, but as someone you could occasionally see in Ten Forward, regaling people with tales of the old days.
You wouldn't even have to work at all to justify his presence on the Enterprise: he's an alumnus of the first two ships to bear the name! Besides, you can always call him a civilian expert on 100-year-old technology, and it's not as if running into Mirandas, D-7s, and other shit leftover from the Kirk years is rare.
Yeah, having the doors kicked down by power-tool-wielding mobs is no fun. Good save, and also what a great computer store! Rolling in and saying you want to test this suitcase of stuff does not sit well with most. Hope you bought them a beer as well (or pushed some business their way). Such places need to stay in business.
(I regularly buy stuff at my local bike shop, the owner has a very nice return policy and lets me borrow his tools. I mailorder a lot, but not all)
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing compared to the wrath of hundreds of parents at a school sports day honing in on you when their little darling miscounted their own points, or argued over a fraction of a second.
And you're the school IT guy who was given the job - by a friendly bursar who was rewarding you for a good week's work - of sitting out on a field, in the sun, under a veranda, with a free drink and a laptop and a box of USB stopwatches, the world's most complex event scoring system, dozens of simultaneous events with hundreds of children, and a years-old Excel spreadsheet with broken formulae written by a PE teacher.
Oh, and the overall results need to be announced in 5 minutes, and the other schools competing will ALL be emailed the results for their newsletters this afternoon, and you can be damn sure that your scoring will be scrutinised heavier than a ticking suitcase at an airport by those nice sportsman your teams just thrashed, and their mummies and daddies, and the result you give now under pressure is going to be used to award trophies, so it better match their week-long analysis of the same data perfectly.
No pressure.
"Nothing compared to the wrath of hundreds of parents at a school sports day honing in on you when their little darling miscounted their own points, or argued over a fraction of a second".
You poor bastard. What did you do to deserve that ?
Pint, because you will need many, many more of them to forget such an ordeal.
ESDI was only in use until mid-nineties and by that time, the interfaces were finally pretty standard.
I'd say this happened in late eighties which would make DDS/DAT unavailable yet (and believe it or not, DDS/DAT has a pretty good track record in terms of recoverable data).
I call DLT or Data8. Although the latter format was fairly new in the time frame, it was already infamous for its crappy compatibility track record (pun intended).
I'd say this happened in late eighties which would make DDS/DAT unavailable yet (and believe it or not, DDS/DAT has a pretty good track record in terms of recoverable data).
More likely to have been QIC.
Perhaps I've been unlucky but I've found DDS utterly unreliable, whereas I've never had any issues with Exabyte 8mm drives. Having said that those were mostly EXB-8500/8505 drives. If you venture to the XL, you may start to experience slight loss in reliability especially if you're into reusing tapes more than once or twice as the 160m tape (obviously) has more of a tendency to stretch compared to the 112m.
I've heard the same thing many times. I've actually found DDS to be quite reliable, but with a major caveat.
When our HP drive stopped reading the tapes it had written, I called support and was asked just how many hours a night I was running it? I answers 14, and was scornfully told that there was a 20% daily duty cycle limit on the heads. After that the heads would heat up enough to soften them and they'd experience excessive wear.
I asked where I could find that in the manual... At which point he admitted it wasn't there. So I said, ok, I get warranty on this unit, and afterwards it's up to me to keep the wear down on the next unit, now that I'm informed.
Next time we bought (non-HP) DDS drives I proactively asked about the duty cycle and was told 15%.
So I very meticulously scheduled backups to limit the duty cycles, and after that the drives worked pretty well.
If the manufacturers were not bothering to mention the little detail of the heads smoking after 3-5 hours of use, no wonder DDS has such a bad rep. I don't actually know if that's the case, I haven't exactly been doing surveys, but so far nobody I've talked to has admitted to knowing about the limit.
Ok, let me hide behind my AC cape.
There.
Most LTO drives (and almost certainly not half-height drives) really don't have 24x7 operation capability at 100% duty cycle despite what it says in the spec sheet.
Up to the point that there's a huge difference between 100% and 50%. The only reason they specify 100% is because they can get away with it as it's quoted in hourly intervals. So yes, you can run the drive at 100% duty cycle for an hour, but then you should really stop.
If you want to write a whole tape length, which may take 8 hours, you should really consider dropping tape speed to 50% and ensure proper cooling.
And if you really need 100% duty cycle, you seriously need to go for Oracle or IBM enterprise drives.
One year, I got dragged to help with an induction day, so I ended up manning the computer centre reception desk on a Saturday afternoon to deal with enquiries.
A friend of humanity wanders in, hammer in one hand and a hand scythe in the other, looking totally out of it. Yep, definite whiff of strong weed in the air.
Potheads wielding DIY/agricultural hardware usually spelt trouble with a capital TROUBLE, so "Hello, can I help you ?" rapidly turned into "DROP THE FUCKING TOOLS AND GET OUT !!!"
Chummy ran off, leaving his toys behind. No idea what I did with the scythe, but I've still got the hammer somewhere.
Needless to say, I was never asked to welcome poor lost ikkle firsties again.
And there was much rejoicing.
Typical owner/management behavior. Payroll is the most important system, as it insures that staff as well as useless overpaid managers, get paid. One would be think management would appreciate them taking care of this, as they could've bailed and pointed those constructionworkers in the direction of the company owner. How would that have been?
Hell, it's the first thing they (used) to teach new hires here:
Job one is 'get paid'.
a couple years ago we changed the system we used for tip reporting. the masses almost set the system analyst on fire due to the fact that the changes to how tips were cashed out were not communicated adequately. Fun times.
Have I?, I wake up some mornings wondering how the fsck I've managed to make it into middle age..
An OTOMH list...
Unshielded 'hot' Radioactive Sources? ..check
Asbestos? ..check (many, many times...)
Open containers of Sodium Cyanide which were balanced precariously next to various beakers containing various acids (just don't ask...) ..check
Working right beside a bench heavily contaminated with shock sensitive picrate salts? ..check
Working beside a metal cupboard containing several Kg of dried out Picric Acid..stored beside the Carbon Tet?...check (I should point out that this was beside the bench contaminated with the salts above..)
Thallium? ..check (left on a windowsill beside a computer I had to visit on a number of occasions over a period of a couple of years..several large lumps, nicely oxidising away..no-one knew what it was.)
Mercury? ..check (bottles of the stuff in unlocked cupboards, well over 10 litres total volume, mostly contaminated, mostly inappropriate bottles, some 'uncorked'..)
PCBs..check (In the centre of London, mid-late 90's...200 litres of the stuff in an open container)
Various nasty OP compounds? ..check
Being in a sealed lab working on a computer when a 'fridge' right beside it decides to vent Nitrogen (the computer station being amusingly placed so that anyone sitting at it got the, umm, 'full benefit' of the event...ok, not toxic, but even so...) ..check
Exposed to very high levels of SO₂? ..check
Zinc Oxide fumes ? ..check
Lyme and Weils diseases? ..check (Ok, not toxic per-se, but having to get yourself checked for ticks after fixing a computer issue isn't normal..as for the Weils...well, lets just say rats get everywhere)
Laser dyes? ..check (Sloppy, sloppy 'housekeeping', hey they're only both toxic and carcinogenic..)
And this was mostly IT work..exposed to all this (and, unfortunately, more, much, much more), yet a microscopic amount of egg can send me into anaphylaxis..on a bad day you'd almost swear that something, somewhere has a somewhat exceedingly warped sense of humour.
I used to work for a Yorkshire based IT company who had customers all over the country.
One week I was sent down to Sussex on a four-day course to cover an imminent new release of one of the systems we dealt with. On leaving the course on the final day to catch a train home, I was stopped at reception and told that there was a call from my office - this was before I had a mobile phone. Apparently one of our customers in the City of London had a problem with a server, and could I pop in to help out a hardware engineer who was having problems as he didn't understand our OS. Of course this meant that I would have problems getting home that evening, but I could stop at a salesman's house overnight.
So I made my way to the station, and caught a train to London Bridge, and then made my way to the customer's office for an evening appointment. The hardware engineer seemed to be pretty clueless, as all he had to diagnose faults were tools on a floppy that he didn't understand. He was convinced that the fault was with the motherboard, and he would arrange for one to arrive at the office for him to fit the following morning. Could I be on the phone the following morning to guide him?
So I headed off to call our salesman to arrange to stay the night in his spare room. I somehow managed to catch the last District Line train to his house to stay for a few hours, then on to catch the first train back to the office.
Tired and exhausted, I make it into the office the following morning, and start talking to this engineer. It takes him hours to get the system working again. Then once fixed, it's obvious that he has somehow managed to wipe the server's RAID array in the process, so could I guide him through the process of re-installing the OS and restoring a backup? By this time it is about 5pm in the evening, and I've only had one sandwich to eat all day, and most of the staff from our office have already left for the pub.
So I stay on the phone laboriously guiding him through the various steps to reinstall the operating system, which weren't that easy. The process was made a bit worse as we needed to install various patches to the server before we could attempt to recover from backup, and each one of these took some time. I remained in the office until about 10:20 that evening, caught the bus home, and then stayed on the phone to him until about 1am the following morning.
As I'd been away from home for a week on the course, I had no food in, and by 1am there were not even any takeaways still open, even on a Friday. So I went to bed starving, and missed a local event I had planned on attending.
Re: "This is what I pay you for"...
Load of doodoo! That's what any trouble-shooter gets -- except when there is no trouble -- then they get "what have you been doing and why haven't I had status reports on your progress". I.e. if you organize things to run well, you are not appreciated when things run well -- only those who are seen as doing well in responding to a crisis are seen as performing "adequately".
Motto: don't create good self-running policies and programs, but only those that create regular crises that you get credit for handling. Saw it at nearly every big company I worked for. No credit for things going well, only credit for when things don't go well and seen as hero in saving the day in the midst of a failure (that could have been prevented by a good plan -- but what's the point in that when such can get you axed as not being "useful")...
Astara,
Re: Your last comment.
If only there was a way to keep the upvote button pressed for the next Century or two :)
So true ...... learnt the hard way BUT I am unfortunately genetically incapable of creating the 'crappy' systems to keep looking good by rescuing the company at regular intervals. :(
Got stabbed in the back by someone who could & still sleep at night.
[Who was aided and abetted by a Manager who played similar games and was attracted to a like minded soul/'Equally duplicitous Git' :) ]
Never did get the 'Office Politics & Greasy pole climbing' side of things sorted out. :) :)