Like many of you I have been there and cant say I miss those days of being a single point of failure to a organization much; Let's be honest here, if you cant afford to send your primary tech on vacation without some elaborate set of hoops to jump you can certainly afford to hire a reliable backup.
after all 2 is one and one is none. Make a case for a full time reliable backup. In the end it is for the best interest of your business and they are likely to eventually see past the overhead of one more Salary to pay. On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:23 AM, Ski Kacoroski <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > We used the following strategies when I was an IT manager at a small shop: > > 1. When folks went on vacation we would pay for them to have internet access > and a provide a computer. If something when wrong and they had to work, we > would pay for their time + something more. This was used to support our > custom configurations, databases, etc. > > 2. We paid a local consultant a fixed $$$ fee each month (like an insurance > policy). This got us immediate assistance when something went wrong. This > worked great for standard items (e.g. exchange server), but not so well for > our custom configurations, databases, etc. I would think this approach would > work well for the storage array as that may be a standard item. > > 3. We also limited vacations to periods when a system failure would have a > minimum impact (e.g. last week of month, quarter, and last 2 weeks of year > were not available for vacations - or at least you had to be in town and > available in case something failed). > > cheers, > > ski > > > ----- Original Message ----- >> From: [email protected] >> To: [email protected], [email protected] >> Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 5:19:22 PM >> Subject: [LISA] how to handle 'vacation' coverage for a small shop? >> >> 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 >> > _______________________________________________ > 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/ -- Paul _______________________________________________ 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/
