October 30, 2014

One of those glorious days wherein I had a block of like 4 hours without meetings. So I spent the whole thing making a slide deck for a talk I’m giving next week. The event is “ignite-style” so I went ahead & did the 20 slides/5 minutes thing. Or, rather, I did the 20 slides. I actually have no idea what I’m going to say.

[Not strictly true. I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to talk about, but I haven’t written an outline or started timing stuff against the deck yet.]

Work is about the most stressful that it has ever been, and I thought I was handling it pretty well (no anxiety attacks, GERD nice & under control, not drinking that much more heavily than usual) but then I noticed a vaguely familiar itch & now I’m 70% sure I’m getting Shingles. But hey, at least nowadays I do most of my work at a standing desk, so if I need to spend the next 3 weeks standing up 24/7, I can probably handle it.

Dinner at Toast, followed by yet another unscheduled trip to WXDU to reboot a server – this time the streaming server was all zombified, sorta serving the Icecast status page, letting me move the mouse around onscreen but not actually interact with windows, etc.

Power-cycled it & then while watching the system log I remembered that I’d installed InfluxDB on it. Remembered because the log was showing InfluxDB repeatedly failing to start.

Once I figured out what was broken, I went home & actually documented the config of that server. Sort of.

At All Things Open last week, I saw a great talk about Chef, which started with the following:

The Sys Admin’s Journey

  • ssh
  • Store notes in ~/server.txt
  • Move notes to the wiki
  • Write some scripts (setup.sh, fixit.sh, etc.)
  • Golden images and snapshots
  • Policy-driven configuration management

When it comes to WXDU, at least, I’m still somewhere between the notes & the wiki stages, with occasional forays into “write some scripts.” Sigh.

October 30, 2014