This is a direct continuation of If I didn't hate you, I might feel pity, as in “picks up on the next paragraph,” so you may want to go read that if you haven't.
This is turning into a saga worthy of Star Wars. Or maybe Office Space.
$FORMER_EMPLOYER's next step was to lay off a bunch of people (developers, project managers) on one of the two accounts that are basically their life blood. This includes the developer who was responsible for keeping the Oracle system running (even as they're running a second copy of that Oracle system, maybe upgrading to Oracle 9, maybe not… definitely not switching to Solaris 8 from 7, like I thought they should; actually, I thought they should go to Sol9, but later experienced dictates that that's probably not a good idea… and then running yet another copy of that same DB under Oracle on Linux, rather than Solaris, so three times the same shit to do on a monthly basis, that it's not clear they've got anybody left to understand), a developer who's been responsible for components of several web apps that function as a front-end for that thing, and a few people who weren't very useful anyway. I consider some of those people friends.
Then, they contacted number 2 sysadmin (counting from the last installment; counting from me as number 0), who wasn't all that happy with his current working environment, and agreed to come back on a contract basis (but is actively seeking FTE positions with Wall Street firms, and will probably get one pretty soon). With him back, they came to realize that number 3 had basically fucked the pooch raw on the backups that I wasn't quite done setting up when they canned me (and which backups have had only minimal touching since then).
So they called me, since I do this shit for a living now, and I'll be back there, also on a contract basis, to rototill the NetBackup set up for the Unix machines, include the extras that have come up since then, make vaulting (off-site tapes, through extant Iron Mountain contract) work, and add in all their Windows clients that are writing to way older, slower, bad tape drives under painful (BakBone) software.
The Boss at $CURRENT_EMPLOYER has been pressuring me to take some comp time, in light of weekends like this last one (there have been several), so I'll probably do that… so that I can go up to $FORMER_EMPLOYER's site in person on a week day for meetings about customer needs and expectation-setting. I'll probably do most of the real work nights and weekends.
I'm in a position now, that I wasn't then, where I know how the software works, and I can leave them with functional documentation for the tape operators and so forth, but they still don't really have anyone who Gets Netbackup. Their current Windows admin may come out of this with that (and is sufficiently competent to do so), but it's not clear that he'd have the time to support it if something blew up, so I may just being on the 5-7 month cycle of going back there to help.
(Looks like I may not have mentioned that this'll be the second time they've called me back there on a contract basis to fix something after having, let's not forget, fired me. The last one was a major disk-failure emergency, which they can go to number 2 about over now–he was still there for that last experience, and pretty much knows everything I do about that, plus more about their current environment now.)
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