Not Dead Yet
Life has been incredibly busy of late. So busy I barely have time to spend on the computer much less spend any time posting here. My best friend is getting married in two weeks, I'm hosting his bachelor party at my house in a few days, projects at work are in crunch mode, and the house was so badly a mess we spent more than a week getting it presentable for this weekend's company. Blah. I hate being this busy. At least I'm not this busy and miserable.
Today was fun while at work. I pulled a shorter day after working 24 hours in the prior two days. Most of that time was spent doing edgy "fun" stuff. Big-time admins will know what I mean...the kind of work you do on a production system where if anything went wrong, you'd be standing before the man with no plausible defense. The kind of thing that is standard, but atypical. Like...moving production data around between disks in real-time to migrate to more standard disk configurations. I made 200GB of data move from non-standard-configuration disks to 200GB of standard-configuration disks all in a few hours. I defined the new disks, advertised them to the server, brought the new disks into the production group, mirrored the production volumes from the old disks to the new, broke the mirrors, and removed the old disks from the group and then the system. All of this as a real-time during-business-hours break-fix so we could then replicate that 200GB of data over 500 miles away and still meet project deadlines. Yum.
It's days like today that make being an admin fun. Normally, what we're doing is glorified user-space stuff. We setup a few accounts. We write a script. We run a command that needs admin privs. But sometimes, you get to do something "fun" that gets down into the thick of it, where you get to approach a big problem with your years of skill, hash out a plan, and implement it without the full safety net. There were a few moments today where I got a bit twitchy and wished I had waited for change documentation, change control, prevetative maintenance windows, et cetera...but for the most part I was smiling the entire time.
A little danger can make a dull administrator's day. We just don't want that EVERY day. Heh.