Pile of Dross

Laws of system adminning

As soon as you’ve understood the procedure for one upgrade a superceding upgrade will come out.

As soon as you’ve finished an extended downtime for one of your critical systems for which any downtime is frowned upon, a software update will come out for it.

My office desktop has Office 2000 installed, which has autosave enabled – entirely sensible precaution give the proclivity of MS software to spontaneously die. However, it has one extremely aggravating feature – it asks me if I wish to save documents that I’ve opened to read. They’re marked read-only in the damn titlebar, I’ve made no explicit changes to it, so why the f*** does it pop up a bl**dy dialogue box 5 minutes later and every 5 minutes hence, asking me if I want to save it??? And after I’ve randomly pressed some button to just make it go away, because its broken my concentration, it comes back and moans that it can’t save it in its original location, so could I please give it a new location to save it, the document I have altered, and probably don’t care about any more. Aaaarrggh. Make it stop. Please.

Shutdown startup: vacuumed postgres db’s on 350 and pnfs – lots of disk space reclaimed, upgraded pnfs to 8.1.3. Installed slony on pnfs and setup replication to 438 – still needs logrotation and startup scripts to be done, would have taken less time than it did but vi decide to be too clever by half and not show me that the files I was editing were msdos style and not unix. CB was trying to dcap write access working, pointed him towards gsidcap but our system was still in pieces at that point so couldn’t really help out that much. Altered pools once they came up to correct settings for multiple io mover queues. Checked gftp doors now using new gftp queue.
Deleted 200+ tickets from helpdesk after mailstorm due to batch scheduler wierdness.