Lance’s Ramblings

Man, this week has certainly been interesting. Started off Sunday night telling Scott (my boss) about my future plans. The next day he had a talk with some of the upper management so they knew my position was going to be empty in the future sometime. Just amazing how much things seem to be getting put into place for me. I was glad to hear that they will fill my position once I leave and they might even get a person to deal with the manuals and such. Its just now finally sinking in that this life changing idea will actually happen. Before it was just talk and waiting, now its more like ‘woa, this is actually going to happen’.

I also got a chance to email Scott Kveton about possibly meeting with some of the other IT groups on campus while I’m visiting OSU in a few weeks. I’m pumped about that! If anything, it’ll be nice to meet some other groups and get my name out. I’m really looking forward to possibly moving up there and get out of Kansas. I could use a change of scenery

Well, I was finally able to have a chance to chat with my boss Scott about me looking around for jobs. I was really glad when he responded in a supportive manner and understood where I was coming from. I finally feel like a load is off my shoulders. He can now look to the future with me leaving and trying to come up with a plan. I only hope that my company decides to actually hire a replacement, because if they don’t, things will get very hard for my co-workers after I leave.

So today was my usual “Work on the farm” day which went pretty well I suppose. I’ve been driving a semi truck each friday for the past month or so hauling our corn/soybeans to the elevator. Usually unloading a grain bin is uneventful, but today one of our big bins full of corn had something blocking up the hatch at the bottom. We ended up having to take out the augar, and using a long metal rod to try and free up the hole so the grain can start flowing. I guess you can say it was a bit like giving a bin an enema ;).

Anyways, that was my day today.

We needed to reboot serveral of our web servers today for a kernel upgrade and it should have gone smoothly. Instead, it seems like everything was going wrong. The first box didn’t come back because apparently the kernel decided to switch the ethernet interfaces again (even though I had set something to prevent that!). After that, it looked like we were having problems connecting to the database server. It appears the config file for networking was incorrect and a route had been entered incorrectly. The fun didn’t stop there … we then noticed that some of the ifconfig settings weren’t exactly correct, so we had to work around that. To make things more fun, there’s apparently a bug with stunnel to where it won’t restart correctly. I’ll have to find the time and make a bug and possibly troubleshoot the problem myself. Kudos to Corey Shields for making several trips to the machine room to make things work.

I apologize for the extended downtimes you may have encountered for bugs and forums. These things just happen sometimes! Anyways, I look forward to the weekend coming up and possibly nailing down some more infra bugs and issues.

Woohoo! So I finally got around to setting up my own personal blog site. Took me what, over a year or so? Anyways, I’ll try and get into a blogging mode so people know whats going on with my life.

My word for the day is: multipass