Login An Annoying Morning At IFAS September 06, 2010 08:46 PM (PDT)




 

An Annoying Morning At IFAS

by chris
 		 

I wrote this a couple years ago while working in the IFAS/FRE department of the University of Florida. I had work to be done and a somewhat-clueless new guy was really annoying me. I was in a pissy mood.

This is a recap of my morning/early afternoon with running commentary. Backstory: I got contacted yesterday by Dr. VanSickle (great guy) because one of his other projects was physically moving their server to the IFAS IT building on Wednesday. He had asked the aess people for help and was directed to me for some reason (probably my mad skills, although they aren't terribly applicable in physically moving a machine). So around 11am Laura walks into my office and says, "Ready to move the server?" So we walked to McCarty D (one building over from us), went up the stairs, got the dolly and went into the office where the server was. We got the 'sysadmin' to shut it down and started decabling it. This is when I realized a few things about this 'sysadmin'; mainly that she knew about as much about hardware as I knew about Egyptology. That is, she knows more than most people, but she certaintly shouldn't list it on her resume as a skill or get a job because of it. We were told through Alex that he communicated with the IFAS IT people and they said we did not need to bring the monitor, so we put everything but the monitor on the dolly and took it to a building roughly a block away, but had to go via:

  • Elevator to get from the office to the ground floor
  • A path around our building
  • Two ramps to go past the food science building
  • A path around the grass near the parking lot
  • A moderate distance of sidewalk along the road
  • Another ramp into the IFAS IT building
So we get to the IFAS IT building, and immediately Laura starts talking about future networking plans since we are running cable within the next few weeks. She is right to do this since she has had trouble communicating with them about it by other means and this is getting to be a time-critical matter. While this discussion is going on we find a spot for the dec alpha server and some guy plugs it all in. As he is doing so he asks questions about the server (which I have never touched until today). The 'sysadmin' woman just acts confused and says, "I don't really know OpenVMS." OpenVMS is the operating system the server is running, yes, she is administering a system running software she admittedly does not really know about.
During this time the IFAS IT people are musing about how they don't have a monitor for this system. They tell us that some other guy /meant/ to call us back and tell us to bring it, but that message never got to us. The video connection is a regular VGA 15-pin connection, so I ask if they have any regular, old VGA monitors. They say no, even though I saw some on my way in. Oh well. So they send me back to our building to get a VGA monitor. So I walk back to McCarty B and grab an old 14" VGA monitor from our stash and carry it back over.
While I am carrying this I think what a great use of my time this is. Why didn't they send the low-skills new guy (Alex's nephew)? I also think back to my knowledge about digital dec alpha hardware and how the video framebuffer card starts the display in a high resolution, even for text including the ROM boot screen (similar to a PC's BIOS). I wonder if this monitor will work at all. I get there and, surprise, it doesn't work. We can't see anything on the screen. I know that you can hook up a serial (dumb) terminal to the system and use that for a main console so I ask if they have any extras as I look around at the six or so they have in use. They say they don't and they can't disconnect one of the ones in use because they are connected to machines that are currently running. This is not true, you can connect and disconnect serial devices, including dumb terminals, without crashing the host machine. I just sigh as they tell me it would be much less trouble if I just went back and got the original digital monitor (which is large, 17" at least). Yeah, less trouble FOR THEM, but I'm the one who has to do the work.
So I take the dolly back to McCarty D with the 'sysadmin' trailing uselessly behind me taking shortcuts across the grass while I have to go around and use the ramp for the dolly. Just before we reach the McCarty D entrance with elevator access, a class gets out of McCarty C. So now I have to get this dolly through all these people as well. Being in a bad mood, they all seem like extremely aggravating and pointless people. I hear one discussion about how they "Hate being in a class where they don't know anyone." Then as I try to stay to the right of the path to make things easier a really bright girl proudly displaying her boobs mindlessly tries to get further to the right of me. Oh, that description of the girl was sarcastic, except for the part about the boobs.
At this point I'm very fussy/irritable anyway. I get inside to the elevator and Miss 'sysadmin' says, "Do you know how to work the elevator?" I fealt like saying, "Well, at least as well as you know how to work your server." So I got the big monitor from the office, put it on the dolly, and took it all the way to the IFAS IT building.
They plugged it in and booted up the machine, at which point I decided to leave. I decided it was no longer my problem, and I'd just take the dolly and old monitor back. Now it is Miss 'sysadmin' and the IFAS IT peoples' problem.
NOTE: The system was brought down at 11am, I left IFAS IT at 1pm, and the machine still isn't up as of 3pm.