Yeah, I've always been at very small companies. Usually everyone respected off hours and only called for a true emergency. When on vacation, I was backed up by either a past retirement age dev, or my PFY.
- ESXi would, after a power cycle, sometimes think you might have moved or copied the VMs, and ask you about it. That message would suggest that the safe answer was to say you had moved it. This would create a new MAC address for each VM's NIC. Power had gone out, and the dev took the "safe" route, so none of the VMs were getting their reserved IP from DHCP. So that was a fix when I got to the hotel that night
- In the early days of using Let's Encrypt, we had several systems that were getting up in age and not able to do automatic cert renewal. Had a manual process to deal with those, and the PFY seemingly had a handle on it. But he got himself completely wrapped around the axle when he was trying to do it, and of course the certs expired. So I'm sitting at one of the few places in Yellowstone with a cell signal trying to talk him through it. Successfully, I might add
- While walking into the Newgrange visitor center, I get a call from one of our early morning office people saying the Internet is down. He was one of the people entrusted with a key to the closet, so I guided him through resetting things. He could have called the PFY, but honestly, better to call me at midday than him at 0600.
- In the middle of nowhere at Hadrian's Wall, I get a call from the building alarm monitoring company. One of our folks decided to come in on a Saturday, and he never really had to deal with the alarm system and wasn't able to disarm it. So he called and I guided him through the process. He wasn't in a position to know I was on vacation, much less out of the US.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
