This site has been neglected quite a fair bit over the year.

Since my last update I got a new job at a data center in Leeds working with a few hosting companies and a rather large domains firm. Initially I was working doing telephone support for dedicated servers however as of two months a go I changed positions to start doing Datacenter work. This includes managing the servers, networking, monitoring etc over a shift pattern. 4 x 12 hour shifts, 4 on 4 off, including nights.

Due to the nature of the company I have learnt a fair bit more about unix and come to some conclusions:

1) Unix – I have really developed the unix side of my skillset and I need to improve further and would like to give something back. There a lot of distributions out there and theres not really an easy way of finding one that helps out in general although I have been doing some research on the kernel and I am contemplating developing my Programming to get involved in that.

2) Task management – In an environment where you have jobs coming left right and center you really need to have a way of keeping track of everything that you have to do, my memory isn’t perfect so I have struggled with this a little, however using Basket ( Basket )

3) Red – An all red monitoring screen doesn’t necessarily mean everything is down. It can and has been faults with the monitoring server / DNS. Or that it is updating the database of all servers that we manage.

4) Kaspersky — Whilst effective it may be updates rolled out on an hourly basis are disruptive and cost time to the daily work as they seem to always hang the computer, and make it unresponsive for anywhere up to a minute at a time.