A view from our snowshoeing excursion.

Snowshoeing and a bad week for on-call.

Adminisk8or

01/15/2023

This week was mostly utter chaos, for two main reasons.

First, as residual from my last post, I've spent the remainder of this week getting the rest of my home Home Assistant compatible, and it was a jump into cold water. Going from using Google's fairly straightforward UI of automation to Home Assistant's extremely customizable UI was like getting too much of a good thing all at once. But thankfully, in the course of a few days, I got most of the kinks worked out and setup, and now things are great. But it didn't help that on top of that, I was on call at work, this week, and naturally, this was the Patch Tuesday that had to rain down hell on us. I would go on to describe the issue we faced, but A) I don't think we ever quite figured out squarely what the problem was, and hardly figured out the solution, let alone any cause; and B) it's pretty complicated to begin with, if you don't know much about networking, SANs, and iSCSI. Suffice to say, we had dozens of clients both within and without our datacenter that were offline, slow and laggish, and everything in between. It took like two days to get it all sorted out; and during that time, it was nothing but stress, stress, stress, on top of having to make some errands to reset some devices.

But this weekend brought some pretty welcome relief. With my manager finally fixing the big issue that hit us, a weight was lifted, and while I did end up having to take care of one other thing on Saturday, it wasn't bad. I also finally got to put some snowshoes I recently bought to good use, as my brother-in-law and I went out to the backcountry mountains and baptized our new snowshoes in the powdery, wintry snow. It was a pretty serene setting, all quiet and peaceful- well, minus the occasional snowmobiles going by, but it was just grand. It also turns out we left just in good time for a Winter Storm Warning to make itself known for that area, so good timing on our part.

But yeah, it was mainly just that good old week that had to be stressful so that I could appreciate the other ones. Until next time, see ya!