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Boxing up Best Practices
Sysadmin Snippets — a tale of tapes and tangled good intentions.
In my years as sysadmin at Griffin Coal Mining, we ran a nearly full-time operation. The minesites used a just in time warehousing system which relied on the head-office computer. A mechanic would request a part through the computer. They were supposed to be able to continue operations for 72 hours without it, with the aid of local printouts. I’d left before the day the Manager Info Services walked into the computer room and said righto, turn it all off now, so I never got to see how well that worked.
Like most reasonably large sites, we used reels of magnetic tape for our backups. I had a carefully-managed plan of three generations of backups, which went to a fireproof safe then offsite.
Abuse of my reliability with backups
I didn’t manage all the computers — there was a technical HP machine running Unix which was the domain of the mining engineers and geologists. All we did for that was manage their backups.
I remember at one point being called into my boss’s boss’s office to explain why our offsite data storage costs had jumped noticeably. It only took a few hours of digging to realise that the technical storage tapes were being recalled from offsite at random times…
