| location: |
| Madison, WI |
| site: |
| GFDL NOAA via SGI (Silicon Graphics). |
| servers: |
| ~30 |
| workstations: |
| ~300 |
| sysadmins on staff: |
| 3-6, depending on how you count it. |
| site overview: |
|
NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) is a climate
research facility utilizing High Performance Computing (HPC) systems.
Large single-system-image (SSI) machines, ranging in CPU count from 64
to 512 and memory sizes in the multi-gigibytes are utilized, along
with a SAN of about 200TB and an HSM of about 4PB (petabytes).
|
| job title: |
| Principal Systems Administrator |
| time at this job: |
| ~2 years; ~15 years at SGI. |
| | |
| years as a sysadmin: |
| ~17 years |
| first computer: |
| Apple ][. Oh, those were the days. |
| first OS: |
| Apple DOS, Apple ProDOS, TOPS-20 |
| favorite OS: |
| Irix, with FreeBSD a strong second. |
| first computer with root/administrator access: |
| The DEC-2060 TOPS20 machine at SRI-NIC (nic.ddn.mil) |
| first programming language: |
| Applesoft BASIC and Pascal. |
| favorite programming language: |
| perl |
| most often used programming language: |
| perl |
| first sysadmin job, computer and os: |
|
“So you want to be a system administrator, huh? How'bout you fix
sendmail on this DEC Ultrix system for us and we'll see...”
|
| ideal sysadmin job: |
|
A work environment where management and staff have sufficient clue.
|
| favorite sysadmin tool: |
| Munin |
| most interesting sysadmin tool: |
| graphviz |
| sysadmin tool I couldn't work without: |
|
Custom fore/background colors per system for terminal sessions
|
| education: |
|
a few programming courses beyond high school, self taught beyond that
|
| when I was growing up, I wanted to be: |
| a veterinarian |
| If I wasn't a sysadmin, I'd be: |
| a farmer. Heck, I may do both soon... |
| when friends and family ask me to
“fix” the computer or
“fix the internet”, I say: |
|
“Describe what is not working in better detail, please, and let's go
from there.”
|
| when I first meet someone,
and they ask what I do, I say: |
|
Computers; Information Technology Infrastructures. I help build and
maintain the electronic equivalent of roads, traffic lights, post
offices, telephones, etc.
|
| system administration is ...: |
a lot of janitorial work.
a visualization challenge.
a never-ending mostly-invisible jigsaw puzzle.
|
| advice to a junior admin: |
|
Learn how to program, otherwise you'll never progress beyond sweeping
the floors. Go to conferences, meet and learn from others.
|
| advice to a senior admin: |
|
Don't stagnate. Push the envelopes, challenge ways of thinking about
problems and solutions.
|
| | |
| favorite food/cuisine: |
|
|
| pizza topping: |
| feta cheese, black olives, tomatoes. |
| work music: |
| random selections from the mp3 archive |
| crisis music: |
| Oingo Boingo, Orb, Iron Maiden |
| hobby/other job: |
| juggling and being a parent to two 8 year old girls. |
| | |
| my office is: |
at home and a barely restrained confluence of books, papers, CDs, and
computers.
|
| co-workers say my desk is: |
when they could see it, “organic”
because of all the plants surrounding
the displays.
|
| learned the most from: |
| old crotchety and opinionated engineers and SA's.
|
| wish list: |
|
more bandwidth. better voip integration with legacy systems.
a profitable employer.
|
| daily web sites: |
Google News
schlock mercenary
shark
tank
|
| backups to tape or disk? |
|
tape, partially because I have a DLT library, and partially because
disk has been historically expensive and difficult to connect.
|
| editor: |
| emacs |
| mail user agent: |
| mew/mh inside of emacs, and thunderbird. |
| web browser: |
| firefox |
| gui or cli: |
| cli |
| computers at home: |
| 5 powered on |
| (primary) home computer and OS: |
|
An SGI Octane2 (upgraded from 1997 to present) with 2Gb of memory,
dual 600Mhz cpus, and two 24" displays running Irix 6.5.28.
|
| oldest hardware in your garage or basement: |
|
An Apple //c+ with LCD display.
80's vintage Sony CD changers.
|
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