Great week for the SysAdmin to be on vacation....

[Ivory_Tower]

Argh..........

Our sysadmin is out all week. The second-in-charge sysadmin is out all week.

I'm third in line.

I'm currently checking my 23rd machine today to make sure that this blasted worm doesn't do any more damage. The 24th (and final) machine is powered off, so it can wait until tomorrow. (Actually, there are three more machines, but they're notebooks and can wait till tomorrow, too.)

This isn't supposed to be my job -- I was supposed to be working on some code, reviewing some other code, and working on a requirements document today. So, now I'm a day behind on my regular work, and my boss is going to see 11 hours of sysadmin overhead charges on my timesheet. Plus I just lost another evening of my life.

And this is a little company. I can't imagine what this is costing the big companies (I heard a rumor that Maryland's Motor Vehicle Administration shut down at noon today to get their network straightened out).

At least this isn't as bad as Nimda (that one just creeped me out, coming so close to 9-11, and took ~18 hours to straighten out, with three of us working on it), but this is still pretty annoying.

This is my first chance to sit at my own desk today. As soon as machine number 23 is updated, I'm heading out.

Our sysadmin owes me big-time when he gets back from vacation.

[TrogL]

1. My wife just phoned - she's got it

I'll have to talk her through removing it tomorrow.

[neohippie]

2. Sys Admins need days off too!

I am a sys admin and I understand that its not your job, but now you have a good idea of the kind of underapreciated work that most of us do from day to day.

Sometimes your ahead of the game and you prevent problems, others you are putting out fires and reacting to new sets of problems, the only constant is that there is always more work to be done than you will ever have time to get to. It's a great job it's a terrible job. People either love it or hate it. Just be thanful that you only had to fix twenty something machines instead of hundreds.

Also this is a good time to explore why you you vulnerable to the worm. A simple firewall could have protected your pcs. Updates to prevent this worm were available since July 16th. Test the windows updates and security updates on a pc to make sure that they won't interfere with applications that your users need to run and them send out emails to them with links to run the updates of patches you have tested. I am sure that your tired of dealing with someone else's work, but now you have had the experience of walking a day in their shoes and the more perspective you have the more you will have to contribute when the time comes to suggest ways that work flow can be improved.

But overall, I would have to agree with you, those two both owe you BIG

[Ivory_Tower]

3. Not slamming sys admins

Sorry if came across that way.

In fact, our sys admin isn't really a sys admin, either. It's just that he's been getting the least software development work out of our group. The second-in-line really is in the same boat as me, but I think he's smarter than me, so I'd rather he tackle these problems first.

In reality, all three of us (plus a young guy) are the de facto sys admins for this office (mainly because our boss won't hire a real one), so I've had roughly ten years of intermittent walking in those shoes. It's just that usually we get to take turns pawning off the "leadership" role to each other, but this week they're both out, so I have nobody else to blame. :) The young guy was a big help today, too, but he had to leave early, so I got stuck here by my lonesome for the home stretch.

It's definitely frustrating -- all four of us know the additional work that needs to be done, plus the regular maintenance that needs to get done, but there's just no time. We're all juggling multiple projects, and since those actually bring money into the company, the overhead work gets pushed aside. At least until a worm hits, or a hard drive fails.

And boy are you right about the firewall!! I think my home network is more secure than the office! To make things even more complicated, we have a couple of "real" sys admins in the company, but they're on contract to the government, so we can only get them here for advice in their spare time (which is seriously scarce) -- I emailed them today for help and never even heard back. I'm pretty sure they've been tied up putting out fires on their several-hundred-PC network today, and don't really have time for a piddling 20 machines that they're technically not even responsible for. But I digress...sort of. These "real" admins are supposed to be setting up a firewall in our office during their "spare time", but it's been about a year so far since they started that project. I suspect it will be done around the time I retire.

Actually, I think I got off easy today -- only three machines actually had failures due to this worm. The rest were being touched, but only in that the tftp.exe program would automatically return if I deleted/renamed it -- that was how we figured out that it wasn't just those three machines that were at risk. But that meant inspecting all the machines, updating all the machines, and re-inspecting all the machines. And connection times to the MS site are S-L-O-W --- I guess I wasn't the only with this problem today.

But yeah, I'm definitely going to milk this when those guys get back next week. :)