Re: B5 actor sighting - Boxleitner on SyFy (was Re: Bruce Boxleitner)

Once upon a time, Doug Freyburger <dfreybur@xxxxxxxxx> said:
I've been in an on-call cycle the majority of my career. Places
that did not pay overtime I always tried to be kind to the night
shift folks because I knew other members of my team tended
to snap at them when a wake-up call came in.

We're a small company, so we don't have 24 hour staff. We have a
monitoring system that alerts us to problems, as well as a message
center (like used by doctors) for some business customers to call for
help. We're each on-call for a week at a time (right now I'm #1 on the
list 1 out of every 6 weeks); our only "reward" is that if we don't miss
anything (e.g. #2 on the list and/or the manager don't get any alerts or
calls), we get a three day weekend the next week.

It used to really suck (you didn't get a good night's sleep all week),
but I've got things working much better now where you often go 2-3
on-call cycles without an alert (you still have to think about being
more available though). The few recurring problems (e.g. mail servers
nailed by spammers, SSH servers by password scanners) that can't be
avoided are self-fixing.

The biggest problem for me is that I'm pretty much responsible for
everything on our network (both servers and network gear). I either put
it all in place or configured it for someone else to put it there. That
means the really weird problems usually fall back to me. I've made our
stuff resistant to the "normal" problems, so when we get an alert, it
can sometimes be for something nobody's seen before (so no documentation
on how to fix, not a real good path documented path for diagnosis).

In those cases (which don't come up but maybe once every year or three),
they still call me. I got a call from work at Dragon*Con last year
while I was working D*C tech-ops. Work had to call through D*C ops
because I was in a cell phone dead zone; I had a radio call for "red
hat" (my badge name) that work was on the phone in ops, and I knew that
wasn't a good sign. It turned out to be not too bad though; the person
calling was already working on the problem, they just weren't sure of
everything that needed to be done (one unique server out of two dozen
otherwise identically configured servers).

I got off the phone, and D*C ops folks asked if the Internet was down or
not. :-)

I figure I could get scans of B5 theme music in MP3 but I
would rather download my tones directly from my vendor
because of security concerns.

When I last got a new phone, I made sure I could load in my own
ringtones. I can load MP3s, WAVs, and maybe WMAs, over a USB cable, via
Bluetooth, or from a flash card. My monitoring system alert tone is
actually a sampled copy of my old text pager; a very annoying sound that
is sure to wake me up.

--
Chris Adams <cmadams@xxxxxxxxxx>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

.

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