I suspect that if you look around in your community, you will find that there are more shops than just you that have this same type of scenario. One pathway is for you to arrange some cross company support between a group of companies.
Another pathway is to find one of the system admin consultants in the area and train them up on your systems. A third pathway is to arrange for an internship for a college student who is going to cover the 3-6 months just around when you are taking the vacation. Train them up on what you need. This also gives you a path to better documentation and better automation. On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 5:19 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > How do you handle 'vacation'[1] coverage in a solo shop? > > I'm the only sysadmin for a research lab, and I'm soliciting creative > suggesions for ways to provide in-depth sysadmin coverage when I'm > not available. > > We're a small group (~35 people), but have a reasonably complex > environment (a 600-core HPC cluster, infrastructure machines using RHCS > HA clustering for critical services, ~45TB of SAN storage accessible via > GPFS and NFS, a bunch of web services within the lab, etc). Thankfully, > our lab is behind a corporate firewall--we have no public-internet facing > equipment, so security and network complexity are not major issues. > > The researchers in the lab are very technical. One or two people have > been trained to provide some assistance with system issues, but it's not > part of their daily job description or core competence. It's difficult > to address the big gap between "simple and routine" and "critical but > rare" when preparing people with no system administration background. > > The easy things have already been taken care of -- I'm happy to say > that most routine sysadmin tasks are either automated, well documented, > or can be deferred. > > However, there will inevitably be complex issues that arise when I'm not > available. During past vacations there have been data center fires, > data center power outages, storage array failures, etc. You know, the > kind of "interesting" events that are almost impossible to document > in advance and which really take a combination of general experience > in system administration and knowledge of the specific environment to > resolve quickly and efficiently. > > > If you're in a solo or small environment, how do you deal with this kind > of thing? > > Thanks, > > Mark > > [1] "vacation" sounds so much nicer than "hit by a bus", don't you think? > > > ----- > Mark Bergman Biker, Rock Climber, Unix mechanic, IATSE #1 Stagehand > > > http://wwwkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=bergman%40merctech.com > > I want a newsgroup with a infinite S/N ratio! Now taking CFV on: > rec.motorcycles.stagehands.pet-bird-owners.pinballers.unix-supporters > 15+ So Far--Want to join? Check out: http://www.panix.com/~bergman > _______________________________________________ > lisa-members mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.usenix.org/mailman/listinfo/lisa-members > > > > -- John Sechrest . . . . . [email protected] . @sechrest <http://www.twitter.com/sechrest> . http://www.oomaat.com .
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