I work for the central Unix group at Kansas State University. Everytime that I've ever gone to a conference, gone to training or gone on vacation. I need to be reachable and have a way of getting online. I have a work issued laptop (a first generation MacBook Pro - just Core Duo, so can't upgrade its OS anymore.) But, these days I always at least have my personal laptop....and often only.
There are things where I'm the only person that can deal with some issue, and continue to have to be the person to deal with the issue when I'm out. There are other things that other people could pick up while I'm out, but they don't. So, what happens is that it waits until I get back or until the person becomes impatient and asks by some other channel what's taking with their request. Usually see a co-worker swearing on our IRC channel that he forgot to cover the request list while I'm out (people who have regular occasions where they need to submit a request, sometimes ask to see if I have vacation plans around then.) I usually resist buying hotel Internet service if its extra, especially if I'm on vacation...though these days I pretty much get it. If only to backup the pictures I take to the cloud. Haven't been on a trip in a while, where hotel reimbursement was something I could get. Its only been recently that I've gone on a trip where I've been largely free of work. (well, actually no...IT security decided our primary MX allowing unsecured connections was a security risk, so they had out provider turn it off....I replied to a few emails saying don't do it, but seemed like they wanted me to be on vacation to spring something stupid on the world) Later they were telling somebody that if the couldn't get a scanner to use authenticated smtp, they could use the campus smtp server, but be advised that the local connection would be unencrypted....so don't scan anything sensitive. Ummm, even if it was encrypted...the A few years ago due to a bad UPS, we lost a row of servers (at the time only 4 racks)....I was getting the University back on line from airport wifi, and the later from my mom's kitchen table in Calgary. (associate director said the outage shouldn't have happened, so they did a test...making it happen again). It was largely bad because due to some unknown reason....they racked the intel hosts backwards from the sparc hosts (odd numbered sparc hosts in odd row....) Primary DNS was a container on a SPARC host, and Secondary DNS was a container on an x64 host....(and we put odd containers on odd numbered hosts) so I expected them to be in different rows, but they ended up in the same row. And, back then we didn't have any off site secondaries. Also there was only one datacenter DNS caching server....and it was a container on a SPARC host. These days all the DNS servers are on x64 hosts....and there's two datacenter DNS servers. (building the latest bind goes so much faster on x64)... Somebody has apparently started a rumor that I'm leaving, and that the University will have to shutdown afterwards....has me thinking that I should see what does happen if I were to leave. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
