Life of a Newly Minted Sysadmin

As you may or may not know, Monday I began work for a company in Kaysville called ABC Office. I am a system administrator for the company. It's actually a job that I have been looking for for quite a long time. I've been slowly getting accustomed to learning a whole new set of people's names, things about them and some things about the company. To date, my head is still swimming a bit. :)

But, the real fun in my job is what I get to do. I start off my day (I'm still learning how this all goes) by changing out the surveillance tape from the day before. I check it to make sure that it did record properly. Then, I change out the previous night's server backup tape. I have to also look at logs from the server and find out what has been going on with it. This is my first real experience with a real server running on a RAID array with a tape backup. It's all new to me and it's kind of fun. This week, of course, has really been an eye opener for me because of the newness of it all. After I do the standard morning things (with great assistance from my supervisor) I proceed to whatever she has me do next. Lately, they have needed me to scour their website for problems because they are in the process of transferring it from one ISP to another. That's kind of boring.

The other day, I had the privilege of taking apart a monitor to see if the fuse was blown in it. It turned out that the monitor was bad and needed to be gotten rid of. So, my supervisor and I went through the building and gathered up all the known bad monitors and tested them out. I must admit that I let the smoke out of one of the monitors when I plugged it it. There's a very familiar and distict smell to burning electronics. :) I also had to call the waste management facility to find out what to do with the dead monitors, since they are considered hazardous waste.

Let's see, I also got to help out with a couple of printer problems in the accounting department. I've also been setting up a script on each machine throughout the company that shuts the computer off should the user forget. Basically, you can instruct Windows to shut itself down by incorporating the following into a scheduled task:

C:\Windows\system32\shutdown.exe -s -f -t 00

Hmmm, that looks strangely familiar to the Linux/Unix way of doing it:

shutdown -h now

Needless to say, I have been having quite a good time so far. I know there will be challenges, but with good training and a level head, I can succeed. Oh yeah, I was also the one who first saw the drive fault indicator on one of the disks in the server's RAID array. So, on Friday, we get to experience changing out a disk on the server. I'm excited.

Chao!!