I have a friend who has decided to get a new computer. The old one just doesn’t seem to be able to handle the load on it.

This is rather amusing, as the “load” is the use of a web browser. I asked and that is pretty much the sum of the computer use. I guess there may be a game of solitaire in there somewhere, but that is supposedly the entire sum of the computer’s existence.

Matt Simmons sent a tweet this morning regarding today’s xkcd comic. His observation was that it would make a large number of sysadmin blogs and I’d have to agree. The rest of his commentary from his blog is also quite apt. I remember having this discussion at the LISA conference multiple times, specifically the hero complex and how dangerous it is to stability and reliability for all the reasons listed.

In our profession (yes, it is one), invisibility is the name of the game. This unfortunately has the side effect of no one really understanding what you do or why they employ you. If you are good, there are no problems, so why do they need you? On the other hand, you get the person who isn’t as experienced yet and who runs around fixing the symptoms rather than the problem and, due to the visible results, gets praised. This leads into the hero complex and it’s a difficult thing to turn around, as everyone likes to know they are doing a good job.

As I have been promising, I have finally pushed the new site live.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to migrate data and users from the old site, so I will be bringing over the users from the old site. If you are impatient, register again and I’ll avoid duplicating you. Due to a difference in the password encoding mechanisms used, you will have to use the lost password feature to get a new one.

Well, advice anyway.

During the weekly meeting while the usual suspects were discussing things that do not affect the site here, I was getting some information for a project and ran across an odd link that brought me to a page that had an interesting looking link on the sidebar. Clicking on it, I was looking at a personal observation page reflecting on the 5 things the author had gotten from his father:

Today did not start our so well, my client ran out of home directory space. Not that this was unexpected.

Yesterday I noticed we were down to 20GB of shared space. Sounds like a lot, given that there are less than 100 people and this is unix home directory stuff. I went out a warning that we were running out of space and it was time to do some clean up. I guess it fell on deaf ears. This morning, it was down to 781MB. Someone had chewed up 19+ GB overnight.