| location: |
| London, UK |
| site: |
| Red Bee Media
Ltd (which used to be part of the BBC as BBC Broadcast but was sold
to MacQuarie in 2005) |
| servers: |
| Thousands overall, in my area about 110. Our ones run a
mix of RedHat, Solaris and there are a few Windows servers in there.
|
| workstations: |
| Thousands overall, my team isn't responsible for any
of them. |
| sysadmins on staff: |
| A couple of hundred in total, 7 in my team. |
| site overview: |
| Red Bee is responsible for the playout of
digital television (and radio) channels and the playout and management
of interactive television applications and content for some of those
channels and website (playout and media
services). We also do subtitling, audio description and signing (access
services) and advertising and trails (creative
services). And there's Digital
Hive and Sherpa. Things
you might know that Red Bee have done; the ITV channels re-branding,
recent Honda and McDonalds adverts, all of the BBC's interactivity (red
button stuff on your tellybox).
|
| job title: |
| Senior Systems Engineer - Team Leader |
| time at this job: |
| one year (3.5 at the company in total) |
| years as a sysadmin: |
| depending on how you look at it 8-10 years. |
| first computer: |
| A ZX81 in 1981. |
| first OS: |
| (apart from the ZX81) Must have been CP/M back in the early
eighties on an RM 380Z.
|
| favorite OS: |
| Solaris for servers, OS X for desktops (though it really
does depend on what the function of the machine is going to be, I'm
pretty agnostic; I believe in the right tool for the job).
|
| first computer with root/administrator access: |
| SGI Indy. |
| first programming language: |
| Uhhh... Sinclair BASIC? If you don't think
that really counts, then Fortran. |
| first sysadmin job, computer and os: |
| For my first full-time sysadmin
job, I'd have to say it was adminning NT4 servers for Mobil in 1998. NT4
was great at the time for user, application and file serving for large,
rich companies.
|
| ideal sysadmin job: |
| One with fewer meetings so I could have bigger
chunks of thinking/doing time. |
| favorite sysadmin tool: |
| Nagios |
| most interesting sysadmin tool: |
| cfengine |
| sysadmin tool I couldn't work without: |
| ssh |
| education: |
| University degree, unfinished PhD (in engineering) and a
bunch of professional courses.
|
| when I was growing up, I wanted to be: |
| A marine biologist.
(specifically, I wanted to be Jacques Cousteau when I was about 5)
Oddly, I have no biology qualifications at all, not even at GCSE.
|
| If I wasn't a sysadmin, I'd be: |
| Bored. Well, OK, for a vocation I'd
probably be a project manager. |
| when friends and family ask me to
“fix” the computer or
“fix the internet”, I say: |
| Not a lot really, my family rarely ask me any more
after years of drilling them about viruses and suchlike. Occasionally I
do hardware and OS upgrades and complete reinstalls, but usually they
get by by themselves. My friends are computer literate enough not to
need my help for basic stuff.
|
| when I first meet someone,
and they ask what I do, I say: |
| “I work in
interactive television”. It's marginally better known than systems
admin, it's easy(ish) to explain and people can relate to it.
|
| system administration is ...: |
| ...like
Gabe said,
“an altered state of mind”.
When I'm in the middle of something difficult, new and/or
critical my brain works like it used to in exams; everything goes quiet
and the irrelevant stuff keeps out of the way. There are times in my
job where there are hard, short deadlines; e.g. the transmission starts
in 4 minutes, if the application isn't working by then, it becomes
irrelevant. That really focuses the mind. Of course, there's still the
day-to-day mundane stuff... getting quotes for new machines, managing
change control on existing systems etc.
|
| advice to a junior admin: |
- Use the man pages.
- Use Google.
- Ask someone who's been around the place a while.
- Do take backups before making changes (make sure they're valid).
- Do stuff, try new things and don't be too afraid of making mistakes.
- Don't fall into the “BOFH” mindset.
Users are not inherently stupid, the “BOFH” attitude is.
|
| favorite food/cuisine: |
| Practically raw steak with fresh bread, lettuce
and cherry tomatoes. |
| pizza topping: |
| Pepperoni, mushroom and black olives. |
| work music: |
|
I like music, but the phone is too important to miss at work.
|
| ___ gets me through the work day: |
| tea. Great steaming vats of it please. Milk, no sugar. Thanks. |
| my office is: |
| Dim. We have no natural daylight. |
| co-workers say my desk is: |
| The one with the miniature glitter ball above
it (bequeathed to me by an ex member of the team who is now my SO).
|
| learned the most from: |
| Doing stuff, trying things, tracing through
existing systems to follow the content path etc.
|
| wish list: |
| OSX on the desktop at work. A 12" MacBook
please Apple, not a 13" widescreen one.
|
| daily web sites: |
| BBC News, Sinfest, the odd web journal. |
| backups to tape or disk? |
| Tape at work and at home. We need
largeish capacity, and resilience/redundancy at work, backing up ~8TB in
a full backup of all of our machines. At home, I got a free DDS3 drive
and tapes aren't expensive.
|
| editor: |
| vi |
| mail user agent: |
| Thunderbird (at home) Outlook (at work) |
| web browser: |
| Firefox (and IE for some HR stuff at work) |
| gui or cli: |
| cli for work, gui for games. |
| computers at home: |
| 6 (if you count TiVo, which I've networked and
put bash on) at the moment, but that's going to increase to 10 when we
move house soon.
|
| (primary) home computer and OS: |
| Mmm, I have two I use pretty equally - a
G3 iBook (OSX) and an AMD Athlon 64bit jobbie (Windows XP).
|
| oldest hardware in your garage or basement: |
| Sinclair Spectrum 128+3 (I
sold the 48K and my ZX81 to my cousins!) and a SUN IPC. |
