07:41 – Barbara is taking today and tomorrow off work to give her a five-day weekend. We’ll get a dozen or so forensic science kits boxed up today and ready to ship tomorrow. That’ll cover outstanding back-orders and give us a reserve of built kits. We’ll build the remainder of the first batch of 30 over the next week. Then it’ll be back to building a new batch of biology kits, our stock of which is getting smaller. And then more chemistry kits.
The deck guys worked only until noon yesterday, by which time they’d torn down and removed the old deck and put in footings for the new columns. Those have to be inspected before they can frame out the deck. They should finish the project tomorrow.
12:16 – I just updated the forensic science kit page to say that we’re now in-stock and shipping. That’s true in the sense that we’ll have kits available tomorrow, which is the earliest we could ship anyway. We’ll ship outstanding backorders tomorrow and will be ready to ship any orders received from now on.
SteveF mentioned AIX servers the other day; I was hired for my current gig as a RHEL sys/net/security admin and I just found out the other day that I will now also be supporting AIX machines, several hundred of them, in addition to the 2,400 RHEL boxen. I will be doing this alone a lot of the time, being on-site, while watching the part of the team that operates down there in upstate NY hire more people in addition to the four more they’ve already hired there. And they have maybe half the machines we do up here. And we are now gonna be put on rotating pager coverage as well. The team lead told me that other day: “Now they know you have a mortgage; they’ll be turning the screws. Welcome to the club.”
Well, there is also the alternative, which I had going on for two three-year periods in my fifties with a wife and two kids. So yo, homies, can’t complain!
What is rotating paper coverage?
Too bad about the AIX boxes. They look pretty and run like the wind but their unix was fairly old the last time I touched one (back in the 1990s). I managed to overflow internal buffers running scripts all the time.
Rotating pager coverage is when us drones take turns for a week each, every five weeks (on our little team here in northern VT) and answer any “Severity One” trouble issues. Rotating paper coverage is when we switch back and forth between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for our daily dose of left-librul agitprop, lies, rumors and bullshit.
We are running AIX 6.x and the book I just got on it covers up through 5.5 and was published ten years ago. I am hoping that it will suffice, and that SMIT is all the regulars say it is for ease of sys admin stuff. But if not, there is always the CLI.
I remember SMIT. I was not impressed but I was able to do things in it that I could not get done otherwise. Me and CLI usually get along just fine except when we don’t. Some of those commands are arcane to the point of impressiveness.
Does the AIX “uname -a” command still give the cpu id of deadbeef? At least I think it was “uname -a”.
I think the ‘deadbeef’ was an RS6000 thing, not specifically an AIX
thing. In any event, ‘uname -a’ on the
AIX-running-in-a-virtual-server-on-who-know-what-physical-server gives
me a plain ol’ reasonable string of names and such.
Yeah, I ran the uname command on my FreeBSD box and it gave me the same thing. I looked over my code from the 1990s and discovered that it was the gethostid() function.