Bored IT manager automates Millennium Eve checks to ditch snoozing for boozing It's New Year's Eve and for many of you this will mean celebrating – but for some the prospect of manning the support lines or working overtime looms. Either way, why not ease yourselves into 2019 with this bumper issue of Who, Me? – El Reg's tech confessional column – in which we leap back 19 years to Millennium Eve. The …
I believe, that if I attempted it, the following events would occur:
1) The mail server disks would crash all at a time
2) The modem would catch fire
3) The telco would disable the SIM by mistake
Sometimes, you are competent enough and even more - but chaos demands its price...
Automating stuff can be useful.
Once worked at a place where we had to have social media presence, including dev team for some deranged reason.
so on code commits I had (using special delimiting tags) nice user friendly PR style description describing the new feature (if a bug fix did not use the tags) and outside those tags all the proper commit comments (links to feature / bug requests, any gotcha comments)
A bit of code that checked new commits, if any magic social media delimiter enclosed text was found, it posted to FB & Twatter describing the exciting new feature that was ready for testing and would soon be with customers in release "n" (release no the change was scheduled for was also tagged as one of our standard "fields" of a commit message)
We also automated sending of messages on significant dates e.g. Xmas etc.
Social media with no human involvement, best approach IMHO!
You do realise that the Reg hacks have automated posts since 21 Dec and are blissfully ignorant of whatever commentards post? (Apart from those containing pre-determined text that would be automatically forwarded to whoever need to know. Responses to those, however, are also run by scripts).
Anyway, happy New Year to one and all!
--------------------------------------------->
Sadly, in the absence of a fizzy wine icon.
"Which reminds me - 2019 is the 50th anniversary of the start of ARPANET."
Although on a sad note, "Net's founding father Dr Larry Roberts dies aged 81"
"American scientist Larry Roberts who helped design and build the forerunner of the internet has died aged 81.
In the late 1960s, he ran the part of the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) given the job of creating a computer network called Arpanet."
Remember the KISSME rule - In this case, Keeping It Simple Saves Major Embarrassment.
When you try doing things like that to be clever is when you then have to start replacing a tried and tested schedule with little hacks; the effort to make it work outweighs the cost of actually doing the job; and the chance of a cock up increases exponentially!
I find the process of doing the automation:
Keeps things consistent across the board on every job (removing missed steps & constant rechecking after yet another "user" interruption, leaving me in a "Now where the fuck was I?" state).
Saves lots of repeated needless navigation steps & teaches me about more about scripting during the setup & experimentation stage with the bonus of making work fun.
Icon for the above & to see in a hopefully new & better year.
Here's to each & every one of us readers, commentards & El Reg's staff for a great New Year, may it bring us what we want.
I have cron jobs that run at hour+delta, where delta is a small number of minutes. It's a habit I started when working on busy shared systems, and I thought it made sense to offset my jobs from the likeliest peaks of scheduled activity.
In a one-off script, I might do something like
$ run-job-1
$ sleep 30
$ run-job-2
... etc
As the last man standing in Alberta, while all facilities to the east & south of the border had closed down on a Friday afternoon (I already had set up a script that ran daily to backup my profile at 4.40pm & restart my laptop at 5.03), I would set up my time sheet, expenses & invoice e-mail to go out at 5.01 to my boss in the US to authorise over the weekend.
So .. he was bored by just doing the email, and did all the other communication methods unnecessarily to fill time. And then automated that because .. It was too much work ? Taking away the pointless job he'd created for himself ?
Seems like he needs some training in timewasting. It should be more fun than that.
I'd agree, but I'm not sure how many supposed SysAdmins (especially in SME's) are up to the job.
They are either unfamiliar with what's available or think the stuff they have to process too variable in structure, so any automation would be too fragile to cope with variations.
You're right though. Boring, repetitious s**t is exactly what computers were built for.
I'd done years of three years of Y2K testing for a Cisco kid, so nothing happened even though my moron mates thought the world was about to end or all IT folk were scammers.
On the night itself I was stuck in a Norwich B&B contracting for the only employer in Norwich. Nothing to do in the middle of nowhere. So I get on the last train to London, thinking if I can't be in Edinburgh or Amsterdam then I can at least see what London is like. It was the last train to Liverpool.
I now live in Edinburgh and I didn't venture out last night. It has become Disneyland. In the mid nineties it was the best Hogmanay anywhere. There were half a million people crushing the streets. Sex and drugs and imminent risk of death - fun! Now the streets are closed by police barricades, ticketed concerts for pap bands, a pastiche of its former glory.
I used to love fireworks. Now they are just air pollution for poor people.
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