SteveJ-restore-test

1999, the lead up to Y2K was a horrendous year for me. Too many long weeks, too much travel, tight deadlines, multiple competing projects, not enough sleep and a level of exhaustion that compromised my short-term memory and took around 5 years to mostly recover from... So at the end of 1999, when a long term friend, Peter, offered me a part-time contract looking after a few web-servers, it sounded like a doodle. Easy work, reasonable hours and good people to work with. What's not to like?!?! I got more 80+ hour weeks, a horror project and an exceedingly difficult Software supplier to work with. But because of my efforts, the site stayed up, remained usable and our area was the only part of the overall project to not make the papers (in a bad way). Apparently the project won a Gold Government Technology Award as well. I presented a paper on the Performance aspects at CMG-A and a presentation . All this and a very high-profile website: the first large-scale on-line Transaction of th...

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Something I wrote in 2002: ‘Digging Out’ - 7 Steps to regaining control This is a process to regain administrative control of a set of systems. It can be practised alone or by groups and does not require explicit management approval, although that will help. ‘Entropy’ is the constant enemy of good systems administration – if it has blown out of control, steps must be taken to address it and regain control. The nature of systems administration is that there is always more than can be done, so deciding what not to do, where to stop, becomes critical in managing work loads. The approach is to ‘work smarter, not harder’. Administrators must have sufficient research, thinking & analysis time to achieve this – about 20% ‘free time’ is a good target. This process is based on good troubleshooting technique, the project management method (plan, schedule, control) and the quality cycle (measure, analyse, act, review). The big difference from normal deadline based project management is the t...