Pants Full of Unix

… and where 's card said “Hacker”, mine MUST say “Backup & Recovery Janitor”. Thinking maybe that won't go over real well at a Bank… unless I can convince my boss to make it my Title (as opposed to my Position or my Officer Title… in the pre-merger incarnation of $CURRENT_EMPLOYER everybody but the last tier of the org chart were VPs of something, so I'm probably some sort of officer, but I haven't so much checked).

I've lost track of my hours for this week. I mean, I put them in at about 85, but it might have been triple digits. I didn't sleep more than 2 hours at a stretch all (Thursday to Thursday) week, and today was my first (and last, duh) in the office for the (Monday to Friday) week. Why yes, I was on call. The description of shit that blew up would bore most of you right on past tears (but, hey, if you want the list of “things that will make NetBackup 4.5FP6 crap the bed”, my list doubled in the last week, so just let me know), but take my word for there having been a major shitstorm daily.

My list of chat windows yesterday morning, after a certain server in Columbus, OH (the, um, NetBackup master for the data center, heh) suffered brain damage and failed to back jack shit (which means, haha, any of those 285 systems across seven out of eight lines of business) up starting around 18:00, and finishing around 05:00 the next day when I kicked it in the balls, was epic, never mind the quality of the trouble ticket over it, which was sublime. Not my personal best in simultaneous quantity (26; my best is 28), but in number-flashing (expecting a response, and a response I actually expected to give) at 6. Holding six conversations simultaneously about a problem makes it kind of hard to fucking fix the fucking problem, for the (fucking) record.

But, back to the point at hand. No more am I going to be responsible for the day to day backup support tasks for some specific environment. Nope, now I'm part of the the Production Engineering Team (you might wonder how this is distinct from “Implementation”, if you knew that there were, in fact, also an Implementation Team… yeah, so do we). The tasks, as I understand it, largely consist of fixing the broken horseshit Implementation throws over the wall. That, and trolling around for problems to fix, caused by old Implemen-fuck-the-pooch-tation Team-raw mistakes, and also by increasing load over time. This is actually going to be fun, if you're me.

My boss is creating this sub-department, separate from the one she now manages (”Production Support”), putting the people she likes (couple other people who were there before me, a new-hire from her prior employer–a large Japanese car-maker, not the one that starts with H–who's going to be doing project management tasks without officially being a PM, and me) in it, hiring someone to manage production support, hiring some more prod support people, moving some of the existing production support people over to 24×7 operations support (woo hoo! on-call will mean I'm second tier support!), hiring some more ops people (mouth-breathers, I expect, a step above the tape apes from Spherion), promoting one of the old prod support people to manage the 24×7 ops people, and finally moving over to be my boss again. I like my boss, but it's cool, because I get to keep her. And I probably get a bullshit title internal promotion, which probably means more money that I don't so much have time to move to the savings account, much less spend. C'mon, humor me… I had to gloat at least a little.

So but the real point here is that I get to go find things that are broken, whine about how broken Veritas's software is, work around it (in a supportable way, which it wouldn't be the first time that Veritas asked me to explain in detail how I did what they said I Could Not Do… it would be the second time for NetBackup, as distinct from Volume Manager, across Veritas products), declare victory. And that doesn't even touch on StorageTek, out of whom I have not yet begun to beat the crap (hint: if your tape drive costs $44,000US for a single drive, it needs to not fuck up, like, ever), but they, too, shall fear my email address soon enough.

Oh, btw… I think I may have said, here or elsewhere, that the merger (remember, the company with which my original $CURRENT_EMPLOYER merged had outsourced all backups to Big Blue, but that went away entirely, because $CURRENT_EMPLOYER had a Backup Team) meant that the number of systems I'd be roughly responsible for backing up went up an order of magnitude (from 3500 to 35,000). Yeah, turns out that'd be closer to two orders of magnitude (it's about 100,000). Yes, base 10. No, I'm not joking. Wegottawhatnow?!?

If you want to see me, you need to shoot for the last weekend of any given month, because that's pretty much the only weekend I'll have free for the next two years or so, and that because Finance says “no infrastructure changes during end-of-month activities”.