I genuinely think that being a system administrator or as I’m known now a senior system engineer isn’t a 9 to 5 job. Well, it never has been for me anyway. I remember as a young child, I couldn’t understand why my aunts and uncles had absolutely no interest in talking to me about their work when I met up with them on the odd ocasion during Christmas, family weddings or other celebrations. To me, talking about what they were working on was interesting! I wanted to know about what they did, the rewards, the challenges, what they needed to learn to get them into those positions and what I should do next. One part of my family are highly technical. They are in great jobs in companies that are recognised in areas of security, micro processors and networks. The other side of my family are involved in more hands on occupations. Funny, I have much more in common with the members of the family who are more hands on because they seem to take more pride in what they do. They also have no problems talking about their successes, their failures or jumping in at a moments notice to give a hand. Both sides of my family have always jumped in to lend a hand when they were needed so please don’t get me wrong. In fact, I got my start in computers by talking to one of my uncles during countless times where I completely messed things up with my first PC in the early 90’s.
But the point is, even on Christmas morning, when everyone gathered in my grand mothers house across the road from where I live now, I would be buzzing with anticipation of what new things I could hear about the technologies they were working on that year. Without fail, I would leave disappointed that they just weren’t interested in talking about work. I couldn’t and still can’t understand how they devoted countless hours to an occupation that they wouldn’t have an interest in talking about.
It’s for this reason that I sat here tonight updating servers. I have been watching a series on Netflix called Suits this week. I never sit down and just listen to something on the television but I have had a lot of time on my hands this week so I’ve been using it to try to actively remove myself from stress and over thinking about things. But tonight I sat down and while listening with one ear, I decided to check on a few sites that I follow. I noticed that there was a patch released that I was waiting on that fixed a few bugs in some software that I use regularly. This got me thinking so I logged into the server it is running on. I’ve spoken here before about getting lost down the rabit hole and this time is no different. I noticed that there was a new security update and several parts of it directly related to another server that I had been thinking about this week. So I decided to go ahead and apply that update. While waiting on the updates to apply, I decided that a bit of code that takes logs from the 2FA provider that I’m using could be more efficient. This is something I thought of while walking the dog one of the days during the week. The address field comes back as a complex object. But by converting it to a string earlier in the process, I can save bandwidth and make it faster for the UI components to display it. So as one of my uncles would say, I decided to “Trick around with that a bit”. I’m very happy with the results. I caught up on another few episodes of suits, a few servers have patches applied and I’ve made a function more efficient. To me, that’s the recipe for a great Saturday night in. I don’t really see this as weird. I see it as a natural extension of enjoying what you do. when you are lucky enough to enjoy your occupation, the lines between it and everything else naturally become less defined or pronounced. I’m not in a position to play much music at the moment. Technology and music are my two major passions in life second only to my family. When this crap of Covid-19 is all done and over with, I will promise that technology will take a major back seat for a while. But for the moment, it’s keeping me quite happy. There’s no where else I can go. I’m keeping my distance from people so that I can visit relations without concern of passing something on to them so if that means I log in from time to time and get a little bit of work done even during the Christmas holidays, I am absolutely fine with that.
Hi.
I understand what you are talking about my man.
Picture this, christmas day, everyone is having fun, playing games, eating etc.
My uncle brings over his new system, its not to old, not to new but he’s just got some trusted hacker friend to tweak it, and make it go better.
He wants me to set it up.
Salivating with anticipation I boot it up only finding it to be fast and really good.
I start it up, figuring I’ll set things up, I have it ready, offline software, watch for it to choak on big installs.
No!
Set configurations, again, no issue.
Do all updates, again no issue, all drivers done.
Update windows and eat dinner.
Clean, apply additional patches, and done!
People have spent 2 hours chatting and having fun, and I have been spending 2 hours listening to christmas metal and other heavy/ hard rock and electronic disco updating a system and I think, thats a night, now I neet pudding and coffee.
Its like that with another desktop I worked on.
But those are good days.
There are bad times to.
Putting together a workstation that was upgraded from win7 to 10 and doing a reinstall only to find that the video/ picture software from 2005 is just to old, it does install, but it totally screws up all the drives within windows unless you reset.
So after 3 times trying and failing, I have to concidder and conceed I need to find a solution to replace 3 packages.
Now I have, but the user doesn’t use it, oh well.
Fixing a spyware full system because the user was to impatient and didn’t wait till I got to a place where I had a solution to the issue he was having allready in use.
Same with a user wanting to record various things and again didn’t ask me first.
Same with a user wanting to do something completely easy and finding himself totally infected with so many viruses that well who knows, and not knowing how he got there.
Worse, I try the function and I can’t find how he could have messed up.
The user who loads a screensaver only to find it malware ridden, that system dammaged, and I should just reinstall, but the guy needs the box back within 3 days.
1 day to kill the issue, 2 days finding a fix.
There have been some annoying but funny moments.
The user wanting to upgrade his mouse mat for compatability, this told to me by a admin in another educational institute.
The user that installed all sorts of malware because he was scared of the notification icons and all those security and updates just waiting to be acted on.
Almost made me laugh that one.
The user that decided that the easiest way to transfer his user account over was to copy the entire thing to another folder folder then kill the old one while still logged in to the account.
He did, but the account was screwed.
Luckily after making another user account, transfering all the files over and restarting all system programs like office rebuilt and I only had to fix a few user apps like dropbox.
Of course there can be down right not enjoyable times to.
Installing a new card of x hardware type into a system, except no manual to rtfm, no data on the device only what is on the cd.
Finding the drivers on that disk and loading it in.
The person that decided to get rid of a certain issue on the net decided to install 20 antivirus, antispyware, antifirewall and all sorts of extras.
Firstly we all know that doesn’t work, also have you any idea how much junk that generates?
I spent at least 4 hours clearing the system and putting on just 1 security package and a backup.
The system was sitting on the dining table for 2 days cleaning itself of junk in disk cleanup.
Then there is the heartbreaking.
The user that decides to load dangerous spyware ridden and pirated software because she doesn’t give a damn and really doesn’t care about tech or her device.
First time, its ok, bring in, reformat, test, its ok.
2 weeks later, and repeat 5 times in a row.
While that was good cash, I eventually decided, enough is enough, I gave her a cd and said good luck mate, I have limits.
There are the normal issues, forgotten passwords, network units not working or accounts only to find that x previder has updated the account or the fibre box and not told anyone so no one knows it needs rebooting, isps updating the router stuffing up all the wireless channels you set up over 30 minutes and have to reset.
Things like that are normal for me.
Then there are the lemons, people buying cheap systems only for me to find that the system is outdated, crappy, and a pile from the start.
Emulation can only go so far.
Having a system have so many issues and security corruption of drivers, etc, only to find that the wireless card is not only support but the company that makes it has been dead for at least a couple years.
Worse, wikipedia allready knew it was dead so no wander there was no support.
A lot of reloading drivers, killing spyware and recreating corrupted accounts followed.
The solution was to replace the card and that was easy.
My only regret was I didn’t order a miniture one so there is a bulbis monster sitting on top of the pc, but its owner has had the best net access in ages and its followed him through at least 2 new machines and its usb so it can’t be all bad.