Sis Admin's Diary #4 - On site
What a busy morning I've had! I'm working on-site most Thursdays, because that's when the technical support team is there, and I usually take on some of their workload. I'm the sysadmin for the on-premise servers that nobody else wants to touch. They are huge legacy systems that are business critical and contain highly sensitive information, and doing anything on them is quite risky.
The only thing I dislike about Thursdays is having to be ready so early in the morning, just to avoid the worst of the rush-hour traffic that builds up by 07:00. It does give me an excuse to leave early, avoid the afternoon rush hour and be back on the network within an hour.
I'm always faced with the difficult choive of what to wear whenever I'm going out. Usually I go for a bright 1950s-style dress and a white cardigan, with stockings, suspender belt and stilletto heels. Today I've unintentionally ended up with more a goth style, in purple and black. I'm wearing my hair up today also.
Getting into work isn't so bad. Aside from not having to commute into the city, my car's a pleasure to drive. She's an old roadster, with the look, feel and scent of a classic car inside. I can hear the loud purring sound of the engine under the long bonnet, as she cruises on the fast road and effortlessly overtakes the slower moving vehicles.
And it never feels like a long day when I'm on-site. Everything's very much relaxed and non-corporate there, though we've all been incredibly busy the last several months. Things will get quieter in December, I hope.
I was the first person in the building this morning, as usual. Ron, a large biker, typically arrives soon after. The others show up around an hour later.
Things to sort today:
- Debugging the PDF generator Logic App. Most of it works, but the Function App it calls fails. I suspect it's because the custom DLL is outdated, and I discovered I can't replace it because of some directory permissions issue.
- Adding user accounts to one of our on-premise systems. This is quite a drawn-out process, involving Linked Servers and quite a bit of SQL.
- The JSON problem. Getting my static site generator to work with the JSON file. I still can't figure out why it's giving me an error.
- DNS problem. Some people are unable to access one of our sites via the custom URL, because of some security configuration.
- Updating a couple of stored procedures to filter out specific records from the data being returned.
- Data export request, which is another SQL task. I have a stored procedure to automate this.
I left for home around 15:00, got back on the network and shut down several integrations on a couple of servers ready for the system upgrade.