Three Days

Wake up, what you been dreaming about I ain’t got a lot to say, but I could talk to you for hours

Country music fans will recognize the stanza as the opening to Pat Green’s “Three Days” which I’m not sure that it has any direct relevance, other than it’s the title song to an album that also contains these lyrics:

If I am truly crazy don’t you know I like my life that way and if I’m really going on out of my mind won’t you hop on board and make your getaway

Which might be a bit more relevant.

Three days is also the amount of time I’ve spent on my new job so far. Monday I started my new job with the National eXtension Initiative. After a few moments of sheer panic (“oh my, what have I done?!?” and “I must be a complete and total ignoramous or fraud or both”), it seems to coming together okay. So far I’ve spent a fair amount of money getting servers to replace our existing borrowed-server-that’s-running-way-too-much, most of the eventual service is going to get farmed out to someone or someones to do all the hosting, but we’ll still need some internal servers for development, testing, and technology exploration.

The sheer panic highlight came in the form of a contract developer we have putting together a prototype for entering FAQ questions, who was having trouble getting their jsp/db code to do what it was supposed to do, mostly it seems because Tomcat was holding on to an old class file it seems.

I’m a Linux admin ignoramus — I’ve delegated all the Linux system administration for the last few years. I’ll get to do that again, but in the short run, there’ll be a few things I need to do, mostly consisting of begging others for help ;-). Add to that I only have the faintest of clues about tomcat and jsp. To be fair, I know how apache and mysql and php work, so I’ll work my way through it, but whew. I’ve been doing this stuff for now on 13 years or so but boy, become a pointy-haired boss, and watch the terror ensue ;-).

It was kind of fun though, my first instinct (thanks Google) was that it might be a code issue, and it was. And I know where more of the “stuff” is on the server in question.

That might be one of Jay’s Golden Rules for System Administration — always know where your stuff is, even if you don’t know how it works (yet).