Historically, we passed the hot phone bag at the end of the weekly staff meeting held at 2pm Tuesday.
Later the weekly staff meeting was eliminated, so it was the responsibility of the person starting on call to get the bag from the person before sometime on Tuesday. Later through the magic of EC-500, we have our cell phones registered. And, a code to dial in and out of the hot phone number. And, its the responsibility of the person for a given week to make sure they dial in on Tuesday. People aren't required to dial out....and we had hoped to eliminate defined schedules, etc. Though operations being very set in procedure, required that they have a calendar of who is on call...and it throws them if somebody other than the person named answers the hot phone, etc. I usually always dialed in, unless I'm going out of town. There have been numerous times, where the hot phone is being called and the person that's supposed to answer doesn't (some of those people don't work here anymore.) At one time after the weekly staff meeting was eliminated, we switched to Mondays....but its a problem on weeks where Monday is a holiday. So, we switched back to Tuesday. The person on call doesn't necessarily fix the problem....they're just the first contact. Procedure for Operations is if they didn't get answer on hot phone, is to call each of us....first at our desk phones (EC-500 rings our respective cell phones)...they sometimes find our home numbers and call those, but their not supposed to. Waking up infants/small children by calling in the middle of the night is bad.... Especially, when a lot of the things that get directed to us as emergencies...went to the wrong place or aren't. (I once got a call because we turned on holidays in the central calendaring system, they were all angry that it would give them a warning if they tried to schedule meetings on University holidays. (yet the whole reason we were asked to turn it on, was because somebody else didn't get a warning that they had scheduled a meeting on a University holiday.) Back when we passed a phone around for on call....we all had pagers. When we went to everybody having cellphones, nagios was changed to send sms. I'm the only one that still has a pager (but its because I take care of the University's email to pager gateway...) Though soon we'll be losing our spectrum license and the paging system will be retired....(actually I think they need to retool for tighter packing of paging systems in the area, and that's too expensive to justify.) And now most of us can access email from our phones....and ssh...which has sometimes been done to fix an issue.... Though I'm debating whether I want to rock things, and change these things to go to my personal cellphone. Its only us single sysadmins that have two cellphones.... (but, there's been talk though of pay supplement for us to use personal cellphones for work, and eliminate the work issued ones...so I don't want to ruin that chance for the others. We haven't had an annual pay raise the las t 3 years, and its not looking like the state will give us one in July this year. We were hoping somebody would apply for our current openings, so that we could do a market adjustment of the salaries in our group...but so far the applicants want the adjustment first before they'll apply. They need an applicant to tell us during the hiring process what market is....) Anyways, when they first gave us all cellphones, they were Motorola KRZR's....but when the University contract with the provider ended, we switched to Motorola Droid 2's under state contract. The thing about work cell phones...is no personal use. And, now that we're under state contract they audit things monthly, and if more than 5% is personal...you have to pay the share of its (entire, which includes the unlimited data and unlimited texting) monthly bill. It wasn't possible to audit personal use on the University contracted phones...perhaps in part because the billing system's developer's parents worked overseas...and he called them regularly on his work cell. (though he said it was more like they buy minutes in bulk for all the phones, and they can't tie the usage back to individual phones or something...) Now that person isn't allowed to have a work issued phone (though he still has to maintain the billing system.) _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
