30-Jul-2010

Systems Admin Appreciation Day 2010

Today is the 11th annual Systems administration appreciation day. Go on, appreciate us.

Posted at 1:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Older Entries

[30-Jul-2010]
Unified validation service:   The WC3 have come out with a unified validation service called Unicorn. This service allows you to validate the HTML, CSS, and ATOM/RSS feeds on a page all in one call. I've added a link in the navigation pane called "Validate everything" to take advantage of this. (95 words)

[15-Jul-2010]
Universal symbol deletion:   Quite some time ago, I assisted the company I now work for to do a port of their in-house ERP... (533 words)

[07-Jul-2010]
I'll wait:   OpenVMS 8.4 was released on 21st June for Alpha and Integrity platforms. 16 days later, the first Update patch is out for it. Oh, you don't see it in my patch feeds you say? Wait 'til I fix the missing release date problem that has come back with 8.4 patches. Needless to say, I won't be rushing to update my production servers any time soon. (65 words)

[01-Jul-2010]
Dangerous patches:   This has been mentioned before so I'm amazed that HP Engineering still hasn't fixed this problem. If you're running Alpha... (122 words)

[29-Jun-2010]
MATH X01-04:   A new version of the MATH utility is available on the MATH download area. This corrects a bug with DCL symbol naming. (101 words)

[03-Jun-2010]
Disaster Recovery Test:   Since Monday, I've been testing our disaster recovery procedures. I wrote the procedures for this company while I was on... (202 words)

[21-May-2010]
System Admin (un)Truths?:   I've just come across an old article by Evan Erwin entitled Top 10 System Administrator Truths. While I agree with a lot of what Evan has to say, I can tell that he's never worked in a mission critical environment by his truth # 10. This is called "The Holy Grail of Tech Support" and put bluntly, he's suggesting that you should ask your user to reboot to fix a multitude of issues. Well, try suggesting that you reboot <insert name of your local stock exchange>'s trading platform in the middle of a trading day and see how far you get. (228 words)

[13-May-2010]
Production support woes:   I haven't posted here for a while. That's because the guy that was doing most of our production support decided to retire and the vast majority of production support tasks got dropped on me. I'm sure you don't want to hear about the joys of manually entering 400+ locations that will be undergoing stocktake in the next few weekends... (249 words)

[13-Apr-2010]
How to do dates right in DCL:   How not to do dates in DCL (and how to do it correctly). (128 words)