iBlog: Nishit Shah

This collection of time management tools addresses the very specific needs of embattled system administrators everywhere. Bestselling author Thomas Limoncelli shows you how to manage interruptions, eliminate timewasters, prioritize based on customer expectations, automate processes for faster execution, and much more. It’s the first step to a more productive, and less stressful system Administration.

Time is a precious commodity, especially if you’re a system administrator. No other job pulls people in so many directions at once. Users interrupt you constantly with requests, preventing you from getting anything done. Your managers want you to get long-term projects done but flood you with requests for quick-fixes that prevent you from ever getting to those long-term projects. But the pressure is on you to produce and it only increases with time. What do you do?

The answer is time management. And not just any time management theory–you want Time Management for System Administrators, to be exact. With keen insights into the challenges you face as a sys admin, bestselling author Thomas Limoncelli has put together a collection of tips and techniques that will help you cultivate the time management skills you need to flourish as a system administrator.

Time Management for System Administrators understands that an Sys Admin often has competing goals: the concurrent responsibilities of working on large projects and taking care of a user’s needs. That’s why it focuses on strategies that help you work through daily tasks, yet still allow you to handle critical situations that inevitably arise.

Among other skills, you’ll learn how to:

* Manage interruptions
* Eliminate timewasters
* Keep an effective calendar
* Develop routines for things that occur regularly
* Use your brain only for what you’re currently working on
* Prioritize based on customer expectations
* Document and automate processes for faster execution

I have always worked as a system administrator and have found this book really very useful. It just takes couple of days to implement and follow what is mentioned in the book and lo..you are now more productive and less stressful system administrator !

This book is a _MUST READ_ for every Sysad.. the elite clan !

Found this cool poem….

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port
And the bus is interrupted at a very last resort
And the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report.

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash
And your data is corrupted cause the index doesn’t hash
Then your situation’s hopeless, and your system’s gonna crash!

If the label on the cable on the table at your house
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse
But your packets want to tunnel unto another protocol
That’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang
‘Cuz sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang!

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy in the disk
And the macrocode instructions cause unnecessary risk
Then you’ll have to flash the memory and you’ll want to RAM your ROM.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!

This is how I monitor Nagios @ work !
There are six 19″ Dell monitors connected together as one big screen. Resolution was a issue in a 40″ LCD. hence we up with this idea. Everyone now envies the sysads room coz its now ubercool !

PS: All those alerts have been taken care of !

You know its love when you remember her IP address to skip DNS overheads !

Its been a while since I have written anything techie. Its not that I am not working anymore! Its just that I am too much involved with my work and reading books these days that I seldom get time to blog it :~) Good excuse! Yeah. One of my colleague at work enlightened me with this cool thing. We, sysads, consider Nagios to be synonymous to monitoring. This is a cool Mozilla Firefox addon with which we can see the alerts on the Firefox window itself.

This addon is highly customizable and even *beeps* when there are changes in alerts. Can write a whole page on it, but .. install this and figure it out yourself!

Nagios Checker

It was Saturday evening and suddenly I got a call from Office. Instructions were clear and to the point “Leave whatever you are doing and come to office in couple of hours as we all Sysads are going to Arnala Beach for overnight stay. Did exactly the same and reached office by around 10pm and left for Arnala along with others. It took almost 2 hours and reached our Resort around half past midnight. There were a dozen of us, all of them couldn’t join as we had just planned in hurry. But boy what an awesome time we had. We quickly finished the dinner and left for the beach. The climate was pretty chill and it was totally dark everywhere..and yeah a bit scary too. Used the light from my mobile phone to guide us to the beach. There was no one on the beach except a dozen sysads talking about everything from Nagios to qmail, singing National Anthem to scaring each other with fundoo ghost stories. We had collected dried palm leaves on the way and lit a bonfire and danced around it singing the sysad song. In no time it was 5 30 am and we headed for the room as it was getting pretty chill and we all were tired of cracking jokes and laughing whole night.

Got up early on Sunday morning as we wanted to swim in the Resorts swimming pool but couldn’t as they were still cleaning it and it was gonna take a couple more hours. Drank fresh Neera of the palm trees around, had breakfast and headed for the Virar station. Caught the Churchgate fast and reached home.