Wednesday, November 03, 2004

HR & Auditors

Well this week has been fun ... in a twisted sort of way. I've had to deal with both human resources and external auditors, and strange combinations of the two.

The external auditors are always a ball of fun. They come here and tell us stuff we already knew and ask us to explain things we've already explained and then tell us we're all doing a bad job because we haven't fixed the things we told them we couldn't fix. And they do this twice a year or so. This time around it was things like password aging. "Why don't you have expiries set on the system passwords"; "Because password aging is enforced in the database and users are forced to change their password at the same time"; "You should enable both"; "If we run two seperate systems, they get out of sync when users change one password and not the other, and this leads to confusion. This way they're forced to change both passwords regularly and they don't get confused". You get the idea.

Human resources is another one of those areas you avoid like the plague. They have a reputation for not getting it, particularly when it comes to filling IT-related posts. This was amply demonstrated yesterday when it was clear that they had a completely different idea to us about where we were trying to go. Funnily enough, today they seemed to get it. The proof is always in the pudding though, and I'll believe it when I see a job advert in my local newspaper.

In a strange twist of fate, the auditors tell us they want to audit the HR system ... :-)

At least there was one good laugh though, thanks to daTechy.

posted by guy at: 18:31 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Friday, September 03, 2004

Made My Day

After an absolutely terrible day yesterday (mod_perl, Apache and PMAP_SHPGPERPROC are not my friends), I needed something to make me laugh. Pierre found this:

I will use Google before asking
dumb questions

It just explains *so much* of my typical day. I think I'll stick it up in the tea room. Or on the door to helpdesk *efg*

(as an aside, with some mod_rewrite-fu bloxsom can be made to handle images nicely :-))

posted by guy at: 08:54 SAST | path: /general | permanent link

Mysql & Replication falling over

Mysql's replication feature is a great way of providing redundancy and load sharing for database servers. Unfortunately, as we've learnt from bitter experience, it doesn't recover particularly well from system crashes (clean shutdowns are okay). My guess is, since the bin log is being written almost constantly, corruption occurs.

Having spent a fair amount of time ploughing through documentation on how to recover from this, I thought I'd share our quick? and easy step by step solution.

posted by guy at: 08:54 SAST | path: /systems | permanent link

Tuesday, August 03, 2004

Proverb

The following was printed on a Stanford year-in-review DVD that crossed my desk today. It seemed quite profound and worth sharing:

If you are planning for a year, sow rice;
If you are planning for a decade, plant trees;
If you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
— Chinese proverb

Update: 2004/08/03.19h54

I've just watched the DVD. These people really have the right idea about how technology can and should be used in education, both at the University adn school levels. We can learn a lot from them. I'll have to make sure the DVD ends up at the right sort of place within the 'varsity.

posted by guy at: 11:47 SAST | path: /general | permanent link