On Thu, 4 Oct 2007, bill fumerola wrote:
>
> i just must be a fraud and liar, not to mention a "junior sysadmin".
There's nothing wrong with being a junior admin. I was one once, too. I
was a programmer before I was an admin, and I sort of became an admin
because I screwed up. Well, this wasn't my _first_ experience with IT,
but its a good junior IT story:
In 1989 I went to work for the Open Software Foundation in the systems
engineering department. Basically, this meant I fixed bugs in Motif,
then OSF/1, then DCE (It was a very small department, and I introduced
each new technology). Maintenance programming is usually kind of yuck,
and at the time I had a "impressive" job as an IBM mainframe 'online
programmer' doing TSO user interface programming in PL/1 with ISPF and
DB2; doing design and implementation work. This was a "top of the line"
dream job for what I trained to do in the mid 80's. Most mainframe
programming was batch-oriented druggery. But the OSF job was unique---I
got access to the Internet with a 56K (a big pipe in those
days---through another 56K to Dec, we were an internet backbone backup
for Nearnet). Anyway what really made it worthwhile was that I got
access to Unix SysVr2,r3,r4, AIX, BSD etc source code, which was a
special thing in those days. So skipping foward, I became friends with
IT folks, and I fixed bugs, wrote tests, and assisted OSF member
companies like Dec to get OSF/1 and Motif updates and patches and other
miscellaneous things. Occasionally, I had to make tapes to send to
vendors.
So, one night, I was making a tape for something. It was 9 track tape,
which was made on our Vax. We had no access control to the computer room
in those days. People made their own tapes and stuff at OSF in those
days. We had operators, but they just did backups. There was a big sign
on the console that said don't type ctrl-e (if I recall), because that
started the monitor, like L1-A on a sparc. So, while the tape was
running, I was bored, and leaned up against one of the Vax disk drives.
These were the size of refrigerator, about 5 feet tall by 3 feet wide.
There was a long row of them. Each drive cabinet had 3 buttons, about
1in square each. I accidentally leaned on the power button, and
immediately heard the declining whir of the big platters spinning down,
and my stomach quickly matched the sinking pitch. "Oops".
I went right to the console, which was unresponsive. "Crap" doesn't
quite do it. Kids today probably can't appreciate the feeling of total
work stoppage that a multiuser computer caused in those days. There
would be people in Japan and California using that computer. So, I
called a friend of mine, an IT guy, at home (pre-cellphone) and said
"Mark, I did a bad thing", and explained what happened. He said "Dean,
tonight you get to learn how to boot a vax 8550". After that, I was on
the root password update list, and gradually became sucked into IT and
networking.
The moral is, Its not what you do wrong, its what you do after you screw
up that really makes the difference for IT.
I also have a good IT story about Jeff Schiller and X Window
from about 1987 or 1988.
--Dean
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