August 12, 2004

Old and Slow

I don't really have a lot to complain about right now, so I'm reaching. Life is pretty good. I'm going to take an ice skating class (I know, ha ha, it's for real though) this fall, and I'm going back to taking French classes since the teacher I like is teaching the class I want, I'm excited about the Olympics, and swimming, and working out, and well, I'm just pretty happy right now. Of course, when one or more of these things ends up being a disaster, I'll have something better to write about, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I can gripe about the equipment we have to work with at work. These Sun workstations that I support were all bought at least 3.5 years ago, and some as many as 6 years ago. Well, guess what, they're breaking. Every week I'm seeing usually 2 or 3 fail, and more often than not, it's the motherboard, which is worst of all since they're so difficult to replace. When I'm lucky it's just the disk, and those are easy to replace.

Things aren't much better on the networking side. Many of our offices still have 10Mb ethernet (it's slow), but the executives upstairs have 100Mb so they never notice there's a problem. We're starting to play around with gigabit on a few servers, but it's in a very early testing phase. Many of our servers have been here longer than I have (4 years), are badly setup, and one day they're going to go poof and we're all going to be in trouble.

We're replacing some special users' Suns with new Dells running linux. Most of these people aren't asked if they want an upgrade, so when I come by, they are all surprised. Some of them are not happy about it, which is nuts, but there you go, and then plenty of people in the hallway are practically begging me to bring them something new. Of course, some genius upstairs forgot that much of my company's software RUNS on Solaris, so, oops, we'll need some of these Suns to stick around after all. Whatever.

So it's not such a bad PFFT. I'm surely PFFTing about it all the time at work, especially when one of these machines break, and I'm up there working on it and the poor guy asks if I don't have something better. I have to be honest and tell him I don't. Heck, one person has a USB mouse that isn't working properly, and I had to put in a PO to get some new ones ordered because I didn't have any spares. That's how it goes around here. PFFT!

Published: August 12, 2004
Editor: stacy