The catastrophes at work seem to be edging out of the way 🙂

I have a new backup machine, a grip on the server monitoring, text messages when something dies (though strangely nothing has since), a hand on the DNS system, a plan to make things recoverable within minutes and a replacement for the flakiest server in the world.

At last I can move on to doing things the way I want them instead of fire fighting all the time. It’s been a hairy few weeks and I’ve learned a lot. In fact when I review what I’ve done in the last few days, I’ve learned so much since I started work here.

Top of my personal list of priorities now are learning to sed, awk and shell script properly. I could do with a firmer hold on DNS too. I’d like to learn PyGTK also, but thats a little further away, the others are more of an immediate need. On a work note, I need to work out how to record bandwidth usage on a per machine basis. SNMP has been mentioned, but it looks *hard* and I’m not convinced it’s do-able that way. Suggestions?

See you at the SysAdmin of the Year awards 😉 Not that I’d win even if such a thing existed…