There have been many times where I have been quite exasperated in this job, however this week has indeed been one to file away for future reference. We have had a new smart card login system implemented, most people have had no problems with it – I however get a password prompt as a result of some thing in my .profile. It’s not a problem really as a new line logs you in – so it would seem that the SSH authentication is working OK.
As I said in the previous couple of posts, we now have an international Oops team – the picture on the left is what I think they would like for a team building exercise. I will if time permits explain the things that have surprised me this week, I should however warn any systems administrator that this is not for the feint hearted. I don’t really know where to start here and I guess that the beginning may well be the place, so if you’re sitting comfortably we’ll begin! The systems administration team has been around here for quite a while and to tell you the truth they can surprise even the most hardened of systems administrators. It is best that I start with the simple stuff that I’ve had to do this week, some simple instruction to a new apprentice in the various monitoring and trending tools that we use – all went quite well.
The next task that I had to tackle was a bit of a shocker, I find that in the team is a systems administrator with many years of Unix experience – who did not know what hexadecimal was. This was the person who took 25 seconds to lock himself out of the system when he was given his new smart card login system, it seems to me that he’s looking for the team leaders job in the international Oops team. In an after the event chat someone suggested that he may have thought that it was something to do with ten witches, but I don’t really think he’s clever enough to make that association.
Still onward and upward as they say, one of the previous contractors – the one awarded the full Mexican bandit outfit plus the ass less chaps. Had spent a great many days trying to get ops centre running, so far a day has been spent on it and it seems to be running OK – all that has to be done is to deploy the clients now. As things stand there won’t be very much to do at all in about two weeks, we are waiting on the powers that be to make a decision on what is to happen as far as the strategic plan for the company stands. In the mean time there is plenty of scope for things to get broken, especially when left in the capable hands of the international Oops team.