So I'm the Stick now. Interesting. Although I don't
particularly feel bark-covered or capable of photosynthesis,
I suppose that will come with time.
I suppose I should
explain. The "Stick" is the person in the systems department
that is the currently designated point man. Got a problem?
Send it to the Stick. You say the webserver has had a
horrible crash? Send it to the Stick. Flesh-eating weasels
running amok in the office? Send them to the Stick. Or
something.
In any event, the whole Stick thing marks my
transistion from being a customer-dedicated Sysadmin to a
more hybrid role. More power, more responsibility, etc... as
well as a more diverse experience in general system
administration as well. Given our current Linux-related
client roster, I'm more likely to be administering 'new'
technology as part of "Systems" as a whole, rather than in
my own little corner of the company, which is basically what
I was prior to today.
Being the only person in the company
dedicated to sysadmin'ing our Linux clients has given me a
lot of userful experience, but I think I've hit a plateau in
what there is for me to learn in that area. Our clients
usually wind up wanting fairly simple things, which I think
is fine, but it doesn't leave a lot for work-driven
learning after you master the half-dozen or so things the
clients are wanting.
Systems, on the other hand, has lots
of different pies for me to stick my grubby little fingers
in, which broadens the scope of my work-driven learning
significantly. I think that may have been a large
contributor to the burnt out feeling I was beginning to get.
At first I thought it was due to my being the only person
handling client sysadmin work, and it may still be a portion
of it, but I think now that it's more due to having hit that
learning plateau. With little or nothing different or "new"
coming down the pipes, I think the routine was beginning to
wear on me.
Hm. What else is new since my last entry. Had
one of my best friends betray me by forwarding a personal
email to his boss (who then proceeded to call me directly
and give me an earful). My roommate questions my wisdom in
sending said email in the first place, but I had _thought_
that I could send my friend open, honest emails without
worrying about this sort of thing. I guess my trust was
misplaced. :( This has been a very disappointing period, not
only because of the loss of a friend, but because in order
to for this to have happened my friend would have had to
have either a) deliberately betray me, and then lie about
the reasons he gave for doing it or b) if the reasons he
gave for doing it were true, my friend would have had to
have lost all semblance of good judgement and common sense.
Then again, "b)" would explain some of the choices he
continues to make... *sigh*
Saw an article on /. this
morning about yet another "Apt rules, RPM sux0rs!" article.
This one went so far as to say that unless the current
commercial distros adopt Debian as a standard, Debian "will
eventually rear up and bite them all in the bahootie". Um,
yeah, right. I've seen too many of these articles cropping
up lately, and it's getting on my nerves. Most of them have
the same fundamental problems. Namely: 1)They compared
apt-get to the stock command-line rpm. 2) They ignore the
existance of rpm-compatible apt-get, courtesy of Conectiva.
3) They compare the 'flawless' packaging of the 'core'
debian apt repository's .deb's to the sum total of all RPMs
in existance.
#1 is bad because apt-get is a front-end
that's capable of working with multiple formats. The "rpm"
command is base-level RPM manipulation tool. It's companion
in the world of .deb would be "dpkg", not "apt-get".
#2
is just plain bad. All the features of apt-get with full
support for RPM files. "Hello? McFly??"
#3 is like
comparing your nicely-kept set of trash-cans on the curb to
the city landfill. You cannot compare Debian's stable
packages to the entire world of RPM. It's not a valid
comparison. Try comparing it to the distribution tree of the
file format's creator, and suddenly you not only have a much
more valid comparison, but a lot of the complaints about
incompatible packages and bad dependencies go away.
Oops.
Then again, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised at
this sort of thing. It's basically news article "trolling"
that's designed to elicit exactly the sort of response I'm
providing here. Fortunately, I'm not responding in a method
that would provide the various journalistic trolls with any
food, so I guess it turns out alright in the end.
My god,
I just came across this
on everything2.
Proof positive that world is a very, very disturbed
place.
[ "Walk softly,
and carry a black stick." ]
