[1998-10-17 Sat 22:11] swap meets and cold phosphors

Saturday. Dr. Lau for a cleaning this morning, which is never the highlight of anyone's weekend, but it's done for another six months.

Dave spent the morning at a swap meet in New Jersey with his brothers in forty-degree weather, walking the rows of tables until his hands froze, and came away with a Tandy VM-4 monochrome monitor. Green phosphor, twenty dollars, and no practical use in 1998 that couldn't be handled by something ten years newer. I understand the impulse completely.

Rest of the evening on the futon with peppermint tea and a heating pad, finishing chapter nine of The Dispossessed. Bug moved from the middle of the room to the rug by the unlit wall heater, which means the temperature outside dropped past sixty. She's rarely wrong about drafts.

[1998-10-16 Fri 23:45] trunks and spare tires

Friday fulls went to tape without an error, which is the only way a week should finish.

My father put tire chains under the spare in the Escort before I left Parma, without mentioning it. Dave's father put an emergency crate in the trunk of his Altima. Machinist in Ohio, engineer in Jersey: different tools, same idea. You leave things where they'll be found when the weather turns.

[1998-10-16 Fri 00:23] windows down and zero tickets

Rich cleared the ops queue down to zero by four this afternoon, which happens about twice a year. The rest of the afternoon was quiet enough to tighten the mount table check in the migration script with Wei-Lin. When the criteria are documented and agreed on beforehand, nobody has to argue in the middle of a maintenance window.

Drove home with the Escort's windows down. The Valley smells like dry grass and dust around dusk this time of year, cool enough to feel like October and warm enough that you don't roll the glass up until you turn into the lot.

[1998-10-14 Wed 22:41] runbooks and roadside cows

A runbook is only as solid as its rollback conditions. If you can't state the exact threshold that triggers the revert, you aren't doing maintenance, you're hoping. Hope is not an operational plan.

We brought a shared Slackware host up across two time zones today. Two accounts, one shared directory, and an incident log for things that don't need a manager. It feels like the right kind of infrastructure.

Dave sent photographs from a thirteen-thousand-mile drive across the states: an Altima hooked to a wrecker in Utah and a cow watching from behind a wire fence. Some people break down in the desert and remember the repair bill; some remember the cow.

[1998-10-13 Tue 22:59] walnuts and rollbacks

Glen asked for rollback criteria for the migration timeline at five. If the mount table does not verify by eleven, kill the process and point the symlinks back. Two sentences for the status memo. It is always easier to undo a change cleanly than to explain why an unverified disk is holding up the floor.

Rich spent the morning watching Yahoo go up four points and offering to buy me a car when we go public. The Escort runs fine, the starter is bolted down, and the print queue had three jobs stalled on tray two. I told him to look at syslog instead.

Dave wrote a prší MUD in Python so we could play over telnet across three thousand miles. Dedicated to Babi, complete with walnuts for counters. I won the first game, and then he took forty-two walnuts off me in five hands. Bug watched the prompt scroll from the edge of the monitor like she had money on it.

The machines are up.

[1998-10-13 Tue 03:42] pine cleaner and permissions

Finished chapter eight of The Dispossessed tonight on the futon. Le Guin gets committee work better than anyone writing management manuals. Nobody gives a speech; they just rearrange the seating and call it consensus.

Mopped the kitchen floor with pine cleaner while Bug watched from the doorway like facilities inspecting a vendor. The floor is clean and the kettle is off.

Spent an hour in the channel answering permission questions on Slackware while grendel pasted twenty lines of awk for a log parser nobody asked for. Rich paged with an acknowledged test for the handover, which means the room is ready for morning.

The machines are up.

[1998-10-12 Mon 00:51] tunnels and anarres

Drove to the airport and back today. The Escort took 87 and 237 without a complaint, and the concourse at San Jose was quiet for a Sunday afternoon. Letting someone walk through the security gate into the tunnel is harder than unmounting a disk, but the wire stays up.

Called home to Parma at four. Dad wanted to know about the tires from the garage extension. The storms are up on Ridge Road, and game five went five to three to New York, so nobody is in a good mood back there.

We are setting up a shared Slackware box on an ISDN line named anarres. Both of us with root. Building a machine together across three thousand miles of phone wire is better than waiting around.

Facilities paged ten minutes ago about a hallway lighting check at Mathilda. Nobody is in the building and the lights do not affect the room. It can wait until Tuesday.

Bug is asleep on my slipper. The machines are up.

[1998-10-07 Wed 01:00] mirrors and two days

Signed off on the on-call roster with Glen before leaving Mathilda. Handing the pager off to Rich for Thursday and Friday means leaving clean spools and zero open trouble tickets, because you don't dump an unverified mirror on ops and walk out the door.

The mirror sync on /export/home/eng verified clean at midnight. Disks are quiet.

Two days left to wait. Bug is asleep on the power supply.

[1998-10-06 Tue 00:31] tape memos and wax paper

Finished chapter five of The Dispossessed tonight. The polite isolation of Urras makes sense if you have ever spent a day in a beige cubicle watching people negotiate who owns a printer tray. Holding the rest of the book for a few days.

Glen dropped a quarter-page memo on tape retention on my desk before lunch. It had two paragraphs explaining why we save incrementals for thirty days. The DLT does not read memos, but management likes paper.

Backup job on mercury completed cleanly at midnight. The machines are up.

[1998-10-05 Mon 01:02] walnuts and load averages

Finished chapter four of The Dispossessed tonight. Le Guin understands bureaucracy better than most people who actually manage networks: you can build a society out of pure principle and someone will still figure out how to sit on an office chair and hoard the master keys.

Someone wrote a card game in Python today so two people three time zones apart could play prší for walnuts over telnet. Some scripts exist to move data and some exist because someone felt like being decent. You notice the difference immediately.

Pager went off for ops two minutes ago with high load on titan. Probably someone running a bad query against the phone directory again. Going to look at it before bed.

[1998-10-04 Sun 01:18] dump levels and coastal air

Tested the new backup loop on a scratch tape this afternoon. Parsing /etc/vfstab dynamically beats hardcoded partition names every single time, especially when someone moves QA to a new spindle and forgets to leave a note. If you haven't restored a full and an incremental in sequence to test your script, you don't have backups. You have hopes.

Drove 17 down to West Cliff before dark to clear the head. The Pacific wind smells like salt and freezing fog, and it doesn't care about mail queues or disk mirrors.

Finished chapter three of The Dispossessed. Bug took over the laundry basket the second the warm towels hit the plastic.

[1998-10-02 Fri 22:27] scratch tapes and serial hoods

The scratch tape on the DLT wrote and rewound clean this afternoon with zero read errors. When a drive behaves itself on a Friday afternoon before lunch, you do not ask questions. You put the tape in the caddy and walk away.

If you are making your own serial cables after midnight, buy a breakout box instead of stripping wire in the dark. Most molded null modem hoods loop handshaking signals right back into the connector, which means your board is happily talking to its own echo and wondering why the terminal is dead quiet. Check the loopback first.

Finished chapter two. The machines are up and the apartment is quiet.

[1998-10-02 Fri 01:27] scsi buses and chapter one

Cleared out forty abandoned accounts from the relay today. About six hundred megabytes of spool space that nobody was reading, some of it dating back three years. If an account hasn't received legitimate mail since the first Clinton administration, it probably doesn't need to hold open inodes on /var.

Also spent twenty minutes tracking down an ID conflict on a narrow SCSI chain because someone pulled a terminator without checking what was downstream. A bus doesn't forgive an open end. Terminate both sides, count your targets, and leave the cables alone.

Reading Ursula K. Le Guin before bed. Bug has claimed the margin notes.

[1998-10-01 Thu 00:06] core files and carrier detect

An intern in eng left an unstripped 400MB core file sitting in his home directory this afternoon, which is one way to find out if the disk space monitor actually works. It works. The pager verified it twice.

If your modem insists on negotiating at 2400 baud, check your init string before blaming the copper. Nine times out of ten somebody pasted an ancient string out of a magazine and left error correction off.

Taking Thursday and Friday off next week. Rich has the pager.

[1998-09-29 Tue 22:29] mount points and bag fries

Bag fries do not travel. Steam kills them inside four minutes. If you are going to eat them, eat them in the lot.

Rewrote the parser for the backup script tonight so it reads /etc/vfstab directly instead of relying on hardcoded paths left behind from January of last year. A script that reports success while dumping an empty slice is not a backup. It is just an expensive way to generate log entries.

In the channel tonight, someone built a fresh kernel and forgot to run lilo before rebooting. We have all done it once. The important part is remembering that the disk did exactly what it was told.