Work/Life Update

Posted January 31, 2010 By Ben Ruset and has no comments yet.

I’ve had several people contact me regarding my last blog post. It was written at a particularly low point for me. I’ve made the decision to stick things out at P’ton for the foreseeable future. I’ve been involved with a pretty interesting digital signage project utilizing Xibo, which will turn into a pretty high-visibility project if the pilot is a success.

On top of that, Laura is having surgery in a few days and it hasn’t been a good time to have to worry about changing insurance or whatnot. Given that it’s unlikely that there will be any sort of healthcare reform in my lifetime, I’m stuck where I’m at unless I can make a jump into a new position that offers insurance on day #1 like P’ton did.

Of course the real problem here is the risk that my Linux skills will atrophy. The department that I work at has a strong preference for Windows servers, mostly because the custom apps that seem to spring up all over the place are all Windows based. I have, though, managed to roll out a few Linux boxes – one for the Xibo project and another one that I have that runs some automation scriping. I won’t even count the two ESXi boxes I have. The other day I went out and picked up the Learning Python book, and I’m going to make a valiant effort to learn it.

Beyond that, the NJPineBarrens.com upgrade/migration is nearly done. Things are up and running with the vBulletin 4 Publishing Suite. All of the content from my Drupal site has been imported (by hand) into the new CMS. I have what appears to me to be a better looking layout and theme for the forums. The CMS side is still weak, but (sadly) that only gets 1/4 of the traffic that the forums get so I’m not going to sweat it too much. As a result of my work I’ve released two small mods to vBulletin.org, so it feels nice to give something back to the community.

Categories: Ben, Work

Frustrated at Work

Posted December 20, 2009 By Ben Ruset and has no comments yet.

Recently I’ve been very frustrated at our lack of doing *anything* interesting at work. Any startups in NJ looking for a Linux/Virtualization engineer?

Categories: Uncategorized

Clean Server Room

Posted November 5, 2009 By Ben Ruset and has no comments yet.

I spent the better part of today going through the server room and cleaning out years of accumulated junk that had been thrown in there.

Highlights include:

  1. 100+ DLT backup tapes, all headed to the degausser on campus
  2. 30 heavy gauge power cables from various servers
  3. Norton Internet Security 2004, never opened
  4. Office 2000
  5. Tons and tons and tons of empty boxes.

The goal? To make it so that when I need to retreat away from the noise of my office and actually get some work done, I have a place to go that not only has a door, but a door protected by a mag reader. And, if I position myself close enough to the Liebert (which is where the table is in the room) I don’t get blown on. The ambient temperature of the room is about 74 F which isn’t bad, and the noise from the servers is at least better than listening to people talking loudly.

Oh, and Jae is a jerk.

Categories: Work

Productive at Work

Posted November 2, 2009 By Ben Ruset and has no comments yet.

I’ve been staying late at work the last few weeks, mainly because Laura hasn’t moved back in yet and I can’t stand being in the house alone.

Over the last few days I’ve setup Dell Openmanage and finished tweaking our install of IPMonitor. Now, when a service goes down or there’s a hardware failure I’ll get an email notifying me. You’d think that this would have been setup before, but my predecessor apparently just scheduled weekly walkthroughs of the two datacenters to look for amber lights on the servers.

Tomorrow’s project will be configuring tighter rules for alerting that will go right to my phone via a text message (I only want the really critical errors to come there) as well as automatically open up a helpdesk ticket. I also began sketching out a new server inventory which I will need to put into Sharepoint along with some other documentation.

It’s a fairly slow time right now, and since I’ve gone to work in academia I’ve really enjoyed the ability to set things up the right way, rather than rush from fire to fire like I had to do in startup-land. That’s not to say that I don’t miss some of the fun of being in a startup – I worked with some absolutely brilliant people at Grid, and I really miss spending time with them and having debates and conversations about tech.

I also found a piece of software which, so far, has helped me a lot. My desk is right outside of the office that the desktop support folks work out of, and there’s a lot of traffic in and out of there. It’s very distracting to be troubleshooting some server or network problem and hear people BS’ing with the desktop folks. Since my desk is actually in a really nice space (although it’s a bit small) and there’s political reasons why I can’t move into an office, it’s become imperative that I find some way of isolating myself. Well, besides the big frosted Japanese privacy screen that I set up in front of my cube, I found an OSX White Noise Generator, Noisy. I have it set to generate pink noise at about 10% of my iMac’s volume. It’s a small app that I just keep open on my second monitor and jack up the volume if someone starts talking loudly or I really need to focus.

I still miss working with Jae, even if he was noisy.

Categories: Apple, Ben, Work