Friday, July 30, 2004

SysAdmin Appreciation Day

Did you feel appreciated today? I sort of did. I got chocolate (thanks David et al), and people generally left me alone. Apart from that it was business as usual in the zoo.

I had a weird no-advance-notice visit by some people from Uni Lesotho. They came to find out how Rhodes' IT division worked -- how we handled support issues, what software we used, etc. It was sort of interesting to find out something about other institutions too. It would have been more interesting if I wasn't in the middle of upgrading a web server at the time.

It was probably appropriate that about 3pm I cut 110 odd people off the network. They're the ones still vulnerable to the LSASS exploiting viruses that are doing the rounds, and they'd had three days warning of their imminent disconnection. We started getting e-mails within ten minutes promising that machines had now been patched -- "please reconnect me, I need to work over the weekend". They're still sitting in the ticketing queue ... I guess there is a bit of BOFH lurking in me somewhere. There are public labs they can use.

True to form, we knocked off a bit early, as we do every month, and headed down to the local pub to have a few beers and talk shop. The usual crowd were there and we had a reasonably interesting discussion about the state of wireless in Grahamstown. I guess a cold one was a fitting end to sysadmin appreciation day :)

posted by guy at: 19:17 SAST | path: /general | permanent link