The Server Guy

A little over a week ago at work a major announcement was made. It seems the business unit I work for has been sold off to a competitor. The sale isn’t finalized, you see, there’s all the typical red tape to wade through… government approvals and whatnot. Anyway, the point is the amount of actual work for me at my place of employment has dropped to next to nothing for the moment. This means I will either have all kinds of time on my hands to start playing with IT related stuff that would be of interest here, or I will be so busy finding a new job (my position with the new company is about as far from assured as it can get) that I won’t have time to post anything… not that you’d notice a change. I have been far from consistent in posting regularly here.

Let’s all keep our fingers crossed that I’m able to work things out in such a way that I’ll have all kinds of time to play with spare equipment and do fun reviews and comment on various software and hardware that you’re all just dieing to hear about.

We’ll see what happens.

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Work has been boring all summer. You see there were rumors over the last couple of months that the North American portion of the company I work for was being sold off. The result of these rumors was that IT work came to a screeching halt. I spent most of the summer at work bored out of my mind.

I’ve come to realize that my job is fairly boring most of the time… even when I have something to do. You see, about 18-20 months ago the team I was on at work was divided up into two separate groups, Server Systems and Collaboration. One group (which I’m part of) is a two person team mainly involved in maintaining server hardware, system backups, and our VMware environment. The other team (consisting of four people) maintains Active Directory, Antivirus, Workstation images, Instant messaging, Server monitoring, etc… basically all the interesting stuff.

I was put on the “server team” because I’m the local VMware expert. Now, don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy designing and do enjoy maintaining our virtual environment, but in general that takes me two to four hours per week to maintain. We purchase and stage about a dozen new servers per year so on a daily (or weekly) basis that is virtually no time taken up at work for me. I spend maybe an additional four to eight hours (depending on the week) maintaining systems… so if you do the math I spend at most 1.5 work days per week doing actual work. Now there are the occasional weeks when something actually breaks and I spend a day or two fixing something, but really that only happens a few times per year. Most of the time I’m bored out of my mind while I watch and/or listen to my coworkers on our Collaboration team get involved in all kinds of interesting projects.

I’m sure going to work every day and not having to actually do anything sounds appealing. To be honest I thought it was great… for about two weeks. After that it became extremely boring with the exceptions of the few occasions when a system went down or there happened to be enough other work to keep me busy for more than a few hours at a time. It has become obvious to me that it is time for a change.

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Over the next few weeks I plan to install and work with some of the more popular Linux distros on VMWare Virtual Infrastructure. In my posts I will work my way through installing and configuring each distro as well as any issues I run into along the way.

I plan to review three or four of the top rated distros but if anyone has a specific request I will consider adding it to my review list.

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