A coworker of mine gave me this as a thank you:


( Read more... )

I got an email yesterday at work congratulating me on my 10 year anniversary of service to the company. I'm glad they don't count that year between mid 2000 - 2001 I spent NOT employed with the company. But I guess it kind of makes up for that year I spent as a temp not getting any vacation, sick days, any kind of benefits (like medical), or decent ( Read more... )

Yeah, I know it's been a while since I last posted... and this post isn't anything but venting about work. Hopefully, I'll have something more worthwhile next time. =)

I get an IM from one of our directory services guys: Him: Ducky, do you have a minute?
Ducky: I will when I get back from lunch =)

At which point, I lock my terminal and... go to ( Read more... )

It's BOfH day here at the Q...

Someone granted themselves broad write access to an area they didn't need, wrote into it and in the process caused an automated process to start failing. That's when I discovered their little dance of adding themselves, doing stuff, removing themselves. So I talked to IT Security. They gave the offending admin's group ( Read more... )

A rather smallish portion of my job involves writing/maintaining lower-level code in C. This is for the upkeep of 3 very high-profile underpinnings of the Unix infrastructure. Since they run on every single host (approx 11,000), this code-base doesn't change much. When it does, I've already put weeks of thought into it. I started tweaking code on ( Read more... )

A coworker came into my office this morning asking help fixing a disk partitioning script in the Linux installer because the author wasn't in yet. The script author was recently saying how he prefers to use Bash features not found in the Bourne shell spec. I told him, "you'd be better off getting accustomed to writing according to stock Bourne ( Read more... )

Heh. Another WTF moment, same service: MDB. It's a directory (of machines) originally designed for people, so it's got features to look things up automatically for simple queries. If I query for "opus" (my desktop), I get its record. A server might have a couple of cnames in DNS which get put into the nickname field, so simple queries on those work ( Read more... )

WARNING: Rant and stupidity ahead.

I was gonna post about this yesterday - in the middle of the shit storm - but now that it's through, I can tell the whole story.

Monday we got an email saying that an entry in MDB (our database of machines - servers and workstations - all unix/linux, plus data-center windows hosts) was corrupted. We ignored it ( Read more... )

Along with 2 peers, I'm at the top of the Unix accounts management food chain at work. There's a dedicated group to handle the day-to-day stuff for new hires, terminations, and group management. When they have questions pertaining to something from the Unix side they come to us.

Yesterday, we got a request asking what should be done with a group ( Read more... )

I swear. The only consistent thing about work is: If it's not something for which I and only I can do, I'm not listened to. For one of my better fights, I had to threaten to quit - after a year (when I said the dividends would pay out) I get praised. You'd think they'd learn.

During the planning of a project, I kept pushing for a longer-term, more ( Read more... )