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[gildorr]

Something kind of scary; as of next thursday I'm going to be the most senior linux system administrator in the computer services division at the US Census Bureau. We do have a couple linux engineers, so I do have people to go to when I can't figure things out, but for sys admin tasks I'll be the best one there.

Comments

[anonymous]

How'd you get so smart?

[jackconstantine]

Hey, congratulations. That sounds awesome!

[gildorr]

It may sound awesome, but what it really means is that the only other linux sys admin who has any real idea what he's doing is leaving, so my work load is about to double.

[jackconstantine]

Yeah, but that's how these sorts of things tend to go as well. Take care - I watched a similar thing happen to a friend of mine over at GW (they went from three sysadmins to one over the course of three years), and he died of a heart attack a year or two later (but he also smoked a pack a day, and I don't think I ever once saw him eat something).

I'm assuming at least an increased level of power comes with the increased level of responsibility, if not an increase level of pay (but, I guess it's government, so maybe not?)

How much linux does the Census use? I would assume a couple Solaris/SPARC servers, and maybe some user workstations, but I thought most of the government was on windows...

[gildorr]

For users workstations the Census uses windows, but my division doesn't mess with workstations at all. We handle servers, which am happy to say aren't windows. I think we have about 100 Solaris servers, we have enough Solaris guys that I don't usually have to mess with them, about 50 old legacy Alpha servers running OpenVMS or Tru64, I barely know where to start if I wanted to work with those, and then 300 or so Linux servers. A number which will only increase over time, because we're phasing out all Solaris, VMS, and Tru64 servers, and moving their work to Linux.

There's a lot of number crunching that people do at Census, I'm not sure what all of it is, but I know they analyze the hell out of that data.

[lovemanifests]

yeah, it's more hard work, but it feels cool.

I started a system/network/LAN administrator training internship this past january. After doing mostly help-desk type of IT it's been a trip.

holler computer nerds!

Happy Birthday!!!

[anonymous]

I hope you have a great birthday. I was there for the first one!

[anonymous]

Hey Darcy, you probably don't check this any more but I just performed probably one of my more impressive feats of geekness and I can't contain myself. I resurrected and am now using a long dead LCD monitor with a screwdriver and a hair dryer.

[anonymous]

Oh, this is Brian, that would probably be helpful.

[gildorr]

I'm kind of curious what role the hair dryer played...