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The details of life
By Matt | December 12, 2005, 2:43pm
Topics: General |
So at the request of Tiff, I need to update my blog with what I did today. And I get to be technical about it, so you can pretend you’re interested.
~4:30 AM: I got up. Woo. That’s a feat in itself. Brushed my teeth, showered, got all nice smelling. Got dressed… thats an important detail, right? Made my morning dose of coffee (2 cups), made my lunch, and ate some cereal for breakfast.
~5:30 AM: I ready to go to work… but I fiddle around and listen to the radio.
6:00 AM: Out the door we go… Turn on the car. Check gage light comes on. Since its in the 40’s outside, the oil pressure is low and it comes up to normal after a few minutes of warming up.
6:20 AM: Show the guard my badge at the gate. Oh, I’m special.
6:25 AM: Walk up two flights of stairs to my office.
6:30 AM: Check my email, check the status of the server farm that I administer. This involves checking the logs for any errors that occurred over the weekend. I happened to write the application(s) that collect the logs and allow me to easily peruse through them.
6:40 AM: Talk to the guy over me, my mentor.
7:20 AM: Got an email from an application developer about one of the errors I notice in the logs. Oops, this one is my fault for setting some property of the server. I change the setting to be a little more lax about how long an operation can run and potentially hinder server performance.
7:30 AM: Install a program to determine why we’re experiencing poor file transfer performance between the public interfaces of the server farm. The private interface doesn’t experience this same issue. Noticed the problem: A system is improperly replying to a private file request. This ends up flooding the public interfaces of the system with bad data. Around 10mb every 5 minutes… this may not seem like a lot, but its flooding every system with the same amount of data. Fiddle fiddle.
9:30 AM: While looking at ways to fix the problem, my mentor and me discover several things that are improperly configured. DNS, IP’s, etc. We break an application fixing this. Some after thought led us to believe that what we had working shouldn’t have worked in the first place.
10:30 AM: Finally fix the public version of the broken application, which became more of a concern than the network traffic issue. The development version is partially working at this point.
11:00 AM: Further changes to the system to sort out the network traffic issues lead us back to square one. We have no solution yet, but we have a better configuration.
11:24 AM: Reschedule my otho appointment that was in January because my class schedule now conflicts with the appointment that was made before I knew my class schedule.
11:30 AM: Lunch!
12:45 PM: I finish fixing the development version of the application that we broke.
1:30 PM: Fiddle fiddle. I force the connection for the private file request so that it remains private and doesn’t flood the public interface. This fixes things. The original problem looks like it was a Microsoft bug, but just as well could have been what we’re trying to do with our environment.
2:15 PM: Schedule my car for maintenance so they can look at the oil gage/pressure issue that I saw in the morning.
2:30 PM: I install another application for detecting intrusions.
2:45 PM: Send my mentor my work report for the term. He tells me its garbage and red lines the report. Twice.
3:00 PM: Leave.
3:25 PM: Put gas in my car.
3:35 PM: Drive by (literally) the post office and see that the line is to the door. So much for mailing that package.
~3:52 PM: Well… I start this after getting the request to do so 
Okay so my life is boring, right? I left out details about this and was ambiguous about a lot of it so as not completely bore you to death. If you made it this far, congratulations.
So bored? pretend to be interested? actually interested?