greatest achievements

[Tom Jackson]

Hi:

Migrating a web app;lication from a Linux/Apache/Jserv PC to my HP J6000. I installed IBM Websphere software on my HP, and Websphere Studio Application Developer on my desktop. Now I'm a well versed Web admin and web developer.

Keeping my job has also been a bit of a challenge.

Tom

[Martin Johnson]

When I as an OpenVMS administrator, I was having a problem with a third party application. The application vendor said the fix was DEC's responsibility since it was an OS issue. DEC said it was the vendor's issue.

I debugged the vendor's application, WITHOUT THE SOURCE CODE, to determine it was DEC's issue. Armed with the evidence, I got DEC to give us a workaround in an hour while they came up with a permanent fix.

Marty

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suppose one of the greatest things that I have done as a SysAdmin was to teach a bunch of DBA and database applications developers to use mathematics. Several years ago, a bunch of these bozos came to me and said my machines were running very poorly and needed 'tweaking'. I said, "Oh, please tell me more about my lousy performance". I had already looked at several metrics and were waiting for these guys to come. The basic problem was that when the tables were small everything ran great but as the number of rows increased the performance literally slowed to a crawl.

I asked them to go back and rather than telling me it gets slower to get a few data points listing transactions per second vs. number of rows.
They did this and I called a couple of them back in shortly and said "You have a join within a join within a join within a join and the searches are all sequential. I'll bet an index or two will completely solve my poorly tuned system." For some reason, they were annoyed with me but went back to look at their code. Next day, they came back and said "How did you know?"; they were convinced that I had looked at their source but actually I had simply plotted the log of the transactions vs. the number of rows and the slope was about 4 meaning that their performance was degrading at about the 4th power.

The net result of all this was that they then had me teach this technique to their colleagues and they left with a very powerful analytical tool.

The moral of this story is that calculus is good for everybody.

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi,

Hats off to you all.

Clay , Iam interested in applied calculus. Please give me some links .

Still want to hear more. Pushing this thread to top to get attention.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

[Christian Gebhardt]

To prevent a company for mobile telcommunication to use microsoft-based servers. Guess what is used now ...

Chris

[Nobody's Hero]

My greatest achievement? Hmmm. Other than being a single parent of 2 wild girls, I'd say.
Managing to stay employed when everything I 've done in the past 20 years is put myself out of work. Citicorp, P&G, and so on.. "I can save you money" Exactly what they want to hear. Consolidate servers, mainframes, midrange. Eventually I look around and say, "wow, I'm down to only two servers. Management say's, "we can house them at our hub". I saved you money? Then its a number "9" on my speed dial to my employment agent. But things are tough now, no jobs in MD area. So, my advice to mgmt is. " NT is not practical." Not enough hourse power pushing that fancy window. Cheap but many of them. I can run 3-4,or more NT's on a UNIX system. The truth hurts. "I cant watch windoze, bump a power house UX box".

[benoit Bruckert]

Well,
it's a permanent fight !
I would say that find an open source software to avoid installation of closed software is each time a great achievement.

regards
Benoit

____
Il faut s'entr'aider, c'est la loi de nature.
-- Jean de La Fontaine, L'Ane et le Chien

[RAC_1]

I think I am yet to achive something that I can put here.

New to HP-UX.

But one very wise decision I made 1 yr back. Quit the job of Data Centre Operator.

Jobless for 2 months then took Hp-ux admin job at very low pay packge. But now addicted to HP-UX.

[Michael Elleby III_1]

Hmmm, greatest achievement so far... Don't think i've reached my peak, still going onward and upward..

But one thing does stand out. In an interview, I am able to speak intelligently to the interviewer and find out in a lot of cases that the 'Tech' individual giving the interview trying to investigate my technical skills is not as knowledgeable as I thought they were (the look of awe is always a funny thing to see)... Which puts me in a better position to negotiate, since they quickly realize I know a little something about HPUX..

Mike-

[Michael Elleby III_1]

Oops, just thought of one..

Started a consulting assignment earlier in the year, and the company had just purchased two N-Classes.. I was asked to participate on the install/implement into the network, noticed that not only two Sr. Level UNIX Engineers were present, but also a Manager was present which seemed kinda peculiar since this type of activity is not rocket-science for an admin... They asked me to configure networking, so I pulled out my set_parms command out of the holster, and noticed how the Manager's mouth dropped to the floor when the other two 'Senior' admins stepped back and watched me put the two machines onto the network..

Aaaaahh,, knew I could think of one..