Until I read this, it never occurred to me that oceanographic vessels would have sysadmins, but now I know better. A truly fascinating entry from the log book of a marine sys admin.
My SysAdmin is a Rock Star because…: He takes on everything. Out where this sysadmin rocks, the boundaries of responsibility blur— where need and capability converge, duty becomes defined.
Take two global class, nearly continuously operating oceanographic research vessels from the world’s premier oceanographic research institution, sprinkle in two near-coastal research ships, add several research laboratories worth of acoustic devices, chemistry sets, underwater robots, remote communication equipment, internet terminals, GPS-backed network time servers, precision laser motion sensors, a typical small-building network-infrastructure packed into standard ship pathways, magnetometers, user laptops, distributed inventory and workflow-tracking systems, gravimeters, old-school physical plotters required by important big-whig scientists, and multiple vehicle information systems, let simmer over 40+ years of continual scientific expeditions and constantly changing requirements, add multiple months of lengthy away-time at sea, sweeten with vacation in cool foreign ports and the hope (miniscule?) of rack-time with hot young grad students, and you have the recipe for one of the hardest sysadmin jobs the world has to offer.
For this rock-star, a typical day might look like this:
- 2 AM wakeup call from the bridge. Problem starting navigation software after ancient PC got rebooted. Uh-oh—driving ship is important! Hurry to the bridge and find a super-old NT4 windows machine with potentially lame virtually untested software from a low-volume sales hardware vendor. Try to start software—something complains of missing .DLLs. Perform awesome sleuthing and find the DLLs in an old partial backup. Carefully reconstruct the software installation by manually copying the dlls into place. Encounter some kind of IRQ conflict or mouse failure which sends the input device into pure insanity mode. Fix the input device and realize that this probably happened before and resulted in haphazard deleting of files from the important software installation directory.
- Help a new crew-member and complete computer neophyte access their email.
- Notice a voltage change across one of the monitoring sensors on ancient all-analog gravity sensor. Swap out boards with available spares until fixed.
- Reboot crashed multibeam acquisition and visualization workstation.
- Explain to worried scientist that low-receive-power high-noise acoustic doppler current profiler data was likely caused by bubbles near the transducer head.
- Find a bug in Cisco IOS firewall configuration left by a ’short-timer’ predecessor.
- Manually re-target satellite antenna after losing signal when vessel turned and mast blocked the path to the satellite.
- Pore over fortran code from the early 90’s, still actively running on ancient Sun server, to figure out and document a legacy data processing task.
- Show the captain how to get music onto his new portable MP3 player.
- Eat lunch, try and fail to kill the conversation which a friendly crewmember, seeking common ground, tries to start about the good ol’ days of being a PC-head.
- Notice unrealistic values coming from sensor on underway seawater flow-through system. Track down to an overtightened valve slowing flow of water through a source pipette.
- Explain to boss scientist that the internet is slow because of high latency, limited bandwidth, network saturation and that the only partial fix is to take internet away from some people.
- Take the internet away from some people so science mission can proceed as required. Try not to be hated in the eyes of the live-aboard workers
- Avoiding the evil eyes, eat dinner by your rock-star self.
- Remove malware and install virus scanning software on personal netbook brought onto network which has seen too many foreign port networks
- Help debug some PERL code a scientist brought aboard from a colleague to talk to their custom built data acquisition system.
- Hit the hot tub. Try to time it to provide an opportunity to meet that cute foreign grad student.
- Fall exhausted into rack. Let the sound of water sloshing in the roll-tranks echo like applause in your ears for another hard, long day faced.
Shaped by a harsh environment, he who rises to the occasion is a true rock star.
