My working life has been in sort of a strange place lately. I usually avoid referring to my employer specifically, though I’ll happily belittle the shit software various vendors foist on the world in great specificity, because I don’t want my current employer or any future potential employers to find their way back to this, since I use it as an outlet from work. That’s also why I ask those of you who know it not to use my name here, especially not my surname (I’ve let my given name slide a few times, but I’d prefer it weren’t mentioned either). At the moment, a search on my name as I use it for business gets you my PGP key, one of my domains, and “about 19,200″ hits for posts to various security, LUG, and especially NetBSD mailing lists. I’d like to keep it that way.
With that overly verbose introduction out of the way… A little under a year ago, I was doing “nothing but backups” (NetBackup, in particular) for a Very Large Bank. It was a good name to have on my resume, but the job description was a dead end. Sure, I was third tier support, sure my next step was storage architecture for the firm, but various skills were atrophying noticeably, despite the fact that some things had been honed (go ahead, ask me about storage device or volume management behavior on any commonly used OS, including all commercial Unix variants, Linux, and even Windows… I can probably answer those questions), but others had disappeared completely (notably, shortly after changing jobs–hello, foreshadowing–I asserted on a conference call that host routing decisions worked in a way that they simply do not nor have they ever worked, in the context of binding a requesting socket to a specific IP address and having that actually trump routing).
So I quit to take a position, still in the financial sector but for a much smaller organization, best described by white space. The things I don’t do are manage network equipment and directly manage Windows systems. I say “directly” because I do manage VMware ESX, which indirectly manages a metric fuckton of Windows systems, and I do actually have to care about those systems. I do also still do backups and, generally, NetBackup only lays a Cleveland Steamer on your chest on Windows, it pretty much works or is easily debugged when it doesn’t for everything else. On Windows… you just get network or tape I/O backup errors, and there’s no descernible broken branches to even start tracking them.
I like this job very much. I took it on a six month contract-to-hire basis. The end of the contract period rolled around about three months after my immediate superior had wanted to buy out the rest of my contract and had been told by those further up the org chart that doing so during Q4 2006 was a bad idea (which was fine by me, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to stay at that point)… and they drug their feet. Then two weeks later a Merger (which was reported in the Presses as an Acquisition) was announced, implying all positions in Philadelphia would go away in a timely (18-24 months) fashion after the merger was completed. Many perks were annonced for full-time employees, one of which I was not. I won’t say there wasn’t a certain sense of betrayal. Since then, however, it has been made explicitly clear that those Powers That Be very much want to keep me around to keep the lights on and, more importantly really, aid integration of existing business systems. I’m good for at least a year, and all of this is remarkably good experience.
I guess I should backtrack to “I like this job very much.” I like it because I have implicit ownership over many important things, some of which I already know well, others of which are new to me here, and exciting to learn. Formally, my job description is Unix Systems Administrator. Accurately, I’m a Unix (HP-UX), Linux (RedHat Enterprise 3/4), and VMware (sort of now EMC, see also Legato) ESX (2.5 and 3.0.1) Systems, SAN (EMC DMX, né Symmetrix, and Clariion), and backup Symantec, né Veritas, NetBackup, through NetApp, né Decru, DataFort inline fibre channel encryption devices, writing to Sun, né StorageTek, 9940B tape drives in L700E and L180 tape libraries. But that doesn’t exactly fit on a business card, never mind that I haven’t had one for years.
This all suits me Just Fine. The exciting bits are VMware. VMware Infrastructure 3 is fucked hard in a lot of ways, but they’re mostly in the design on extraneous aspects (ie, can’t manage ESX absent Virtual Center, can’t run Virtual Center, either server of client, without .NET, and it’s buggy as all fuck), not in fundamental ways. There are some core problems (like with EMC, né Legato, clustering, which is kind of flaky, but also with the uniformly abnormal ways in which the VMKernal handles networking)… but this is straying into a “vendor technology X sucks of these reasons that could be fixed by Y”, and that’s a tangent I’d rather not follow tonight, having followed enough.
Genug.
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