Admin from hell - old style

All the knights gathered around the table and stories were told of bravery and woe. Bonds were strengthened, lies were demolished, rumors were enhanced and bellies were fed, all to the music from the ND8 upgrade band. It was truly good to be amongst so many friends and the thought of not having to brave the beast alone was very comforting.

The elaborate moment of truth comes when you have to stand in front of your colleagues and in a loud clear voice say "it was my fault". Naturally not something most of us look forward to do but once you've done it and all those uncomfortable questions have been answered, it's like sailing in to the clear crisp water of a lagoon. Man, what a rush !  The situation was made even more interesting when a close manager changed his mind and explained that he never had put any pressure on me to complete the task. Thank you... another dark moment to forget.

We are no longer working in projects, no sir! Now it's all about "proper projects" and "initiatives".  The kind of projects I do where we recently re-used an older server and boosted it with hard-drives, included it in the backup routines and launched it as an archive server bringing almost one terrabyte of data off the main servers are no longer good. This should now be turned in to "proper projects" and following meticulous models and elaborate orgcharts where business benefit will be derived and... *sigh*.   Over confident and under estimate - over confident in the models of project management and under estimate the power of common sense and once again so much will be lost just because of imperial vanity.  This is where we are now, and we are moving in to the age of "theoretical reality" - where in theory it should work but in reality it does not.  There is a server farm that will hit maximum capacity in 6 month but instead of allowing me to solve the problem now this will be placed in the hands of a "proper project". In the end I will probably have to resolve the situation anyway.

There is news in the air. Some of you may remember that the former Evil Lord Marshal arranged a tournament to compare 50% of Lotus Notes with 100% of MS Exchange. The outcome was a crushing defeat for the Evil Empire, not only from a technical point of view but also from a financial aspect. If a complete comparison had been made one can only dream of how that would have echoed in the hall of fame. Never the less the Evil Empire still lives on in financial splendor and the loss of one small kingdom like ours was apparently no skin of their rosy nose!

As you all know there is a new Lord Marshal and we, his brave knights, all await his first command. So far there has been a few general statements from his headquarter about the kingdom as such, the brave knights and how we should prepare ourselves for "things to come" but the big "ordres de bataille" are still to come. They are expected soon and we all listen for the thunder of hooves as the messengers ride out from his castle in Middle Earth.

Then when leaving the conference we all got stuck in an elevator -yes, really! A few people were left outside and one of them were the very same "close manager". As soon as he knew that we had called for assistance he was off like a dart, apparently he had some private things that urgently needed his attention... could it be the laundry or was it some knitting that had to be done before nightfall or perhaps was the kettle was boiling... I could only guess, but obviously it was much more important than rescuing the core team of his brave knights caught in the dragons cage hanging suspended in rickety old ropes just waiting to plunge in to the fiery Mines of Moria. So much for that "close manager"...

Yours
//J

It's that time of the year when the controllers and financial guys all get the shakes because it's SALARY TIME!!! Yepp, all the managers are forced to talk (poor them) to their employees and listen to all their babbel about how good they have been and how hard they have worked and how many hours of overtime they actually have put in although they never claimed it. You know - all that jazz.

In the recent light of events my credits with the illustrious boss was not on the high note but rather in a low key where something like The Valkyrie by Wagner would be expected to start at. Not feeling in the slightest mood for crawling in the gravel just to please the upper level tennants I just went about my business but with all the server crashing and admin4 clogging up I knew that my rates were down.

The salary increase was fixed in advance however there was a plus/minus 0.4 of a percent that could vary depending on good or bad performance. Can you imagine !!!!  So I could have been a real slacker at work, arriving late and heading off to the beach early to catch the afternoon waves instead of working my fingers to the bone all those late evenings and weekends. And all I would have lost is less than 1% on top of the pre-arranged salary increase!!!!  So guess who is changing the attitude for next year - he, he. Surf's up !

Next thing is that we're having a conference and I will have to stand up and explain to everyone what a bad bunny I have been and how I plan to clean the whole mess up after the split some 2 weeks ago. We noticed a funny thing with the Admin4 database where it actually stores ALL records for a particular user deletion until it has been processed on all servers. With a big server community there is always one or two servers lost in transit - going or coming, being repaired or not being repaired. How should I keep track of that...  *sigh*   Never the less they expect me to say something clever at the conference... I wonder if I ever will peak out in being "low"...

And surely you have noticed that the Admin4 stores things beyond the 21 days of normal lifetime expectancy. I remember an episode with Black Adder goes forth where he applies to the airforce and joins the "Twenty minuters" which he later finds out from his instructor is the average lifetime expectancy of a new pilot - not very reassuring.  Same thing will silly Domino - or rather silly local administrators - bringing in a backup tape from 1432 and replacing the Admin4 database on a local server that was shagged. Will anyone ever admit to doing something silly - never. So I am the one who has to fix it all, as usual.

I guess I am the only one admiting to mistakes and look where that has brought me... 0.4% down !  That's a laughter worth every penny !

Your man at the Banana Company
//Jake


...have you not heard ?

many monkeys in a tree
the ones who look down
see a bunch of smiling monkeys
the ones who look up
...well, you figure it out

 Naturally all hell broke loose - hacking out all those users in just 3 days and the AdminP chocked on almost all servers. What a surprise (duh?) When will I ever learn not to let myself be pushed around by other managers just because they decide everything has to be done in a hurry? Sure, I had my gut feelings that this would probably be a belly-up-show but I had myuself talked in to it!  ...I am a silly bitch some times!

So rather than moaning and watching the world go buy the Admin4 database was stripped from a lot of entries and normality resumed. next up is to add the deleted users (copy-paste, and "yes" I have a backup) in smaller batches, say 2000 per time, and then delete them immediately. This way the AdminP will start over again and raid the domain for the names to be deleted.

I hope this will be one of my last moanings because I am really tired of myself being so negative. Now it's time to find some new energy end get cracking!!!

It's either that or get a new job.

//Jake