greatest achievements

[U.SivaKumar_2]

Hi all,

Please post the greatest achievement you think
that you have done in your life as a system administrator.

regards,
U.SivaKumar

"Expert is one who knows more and more about less and less"

[Chris Wilshaw · Accepted solution]

Quite a useful one - learned to remain calm in a crisis.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Rewrote two 4GL applications in perl/DBI. One 48 hour process went back to 24 minutes, and one 9 hour process went back to 8 minutes.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

?? Set up https://www.beepz.com/personal/merijn to make a lot of useful stuff available to the ITRC forum members
?? Ported gcc-3 to HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00 in both 32- and 64-bit and made them available on beepz. [ You don't have the faintest idea how much effort it took to get the 64bit version running on 11.00 ]

[Vicente Sanchez_3]

My first support recomendation.

A customers had a problem with Oracle DB. I recomended to increase values of several kernel parameters. It worked fine.

[Ravi_8]

making oracle to work on HP platform without applying recommended patches.

[Donald Kok]

I learned to do maintainance one machine at a time. In case of a murphy incident I don't end up with a lot of machines in trouble in the middle of the night.

[BFA6]

Hi,

Greatest achievements - not making too many blunders :-)

Regards,

Hilary

[Justo Exposito]

Hi,

To adapt two 9000 production boxes for year 2000 in a month out of office time.
Change from HP/UX 9.00 to 10.20 and apply all the Y2K patches, change Ingres database from Ingres 6.4 to OpenIngres 1.2,
change the application ManMan/X to Manufacturing Knowledge jumping to 5 versions later and all fine at a time.

Regards,

Justo.

[Pete Randall]

My greatest achievement would have to be getting out of the IBM mainframe world and into HP-UX.

Pete

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

I think a lot will agree that there is nothing particularly difficult in admin other than being careful.. public itrc contributions of all sorts must be high on everyones list here..

Later,
Bill

[harry d brown jr]

The one that saved my company $$$$$$$$$$$$:

Forcing the "backup" team to look at another backup product other than Veritas, which was originally priced at over 7 million dollars. We had EMC give us a quote for the EDM backup software which forced Veritas to get a clue. Yeah we saved 5 million dollars and are stuck with Veritas, which really isn't cutting the mustard, but hey, we saved 5 million! If we had actually purchased EDM, we'd be doing backups right now. Never mind that the project is eight months into implementation! Oh well, I guess one battle at a time.


live free or die
harry

[Robert Thorneycroft]

Years ago when I was just starting out as an administrator my company had just signed up for DR with HP. At the time the whole thing was a manual process with a few dummy scripts to help out.

After the first rehearsal I thought screw all that for a game of dominos, I am sure I can write a script to do everything automagically. Anyhow I sat down for about a day and wrote a script which I was unable to test.

The next time I went to DR I ran the script for the 1st time and it configured a cold install to a working instance in one command with no additional configuration required other than a pre-prepared config file.

The recovery expert at the time said he had never heard of anyone else have a completely automated script which actually worked 100%.

At the time I had been a sys admin for about 3 months with no prior unix experience. Needless to say they had to have the door widened to get my head out of the room ;)

[Rita C Workman]

Unraveling the spaghetti administration the former 'consultants' did to the systems here. Obviously, done to ensure they would never be gotten rid of. It took 18 months to find it ALL...it was a nightmare !

Managing to survive - still employed (and the newbie UNIX person) here - in spite of the politics of new administrations.

And my biggest achievement I would say has been that no matter what has 'hit the fan' I am still here ! And as others have said...have still managed to keep my calm (pretty much !).

Regards,
Rita

[Rita C Workman]

Forgot one...and I am still in the top 25 of the ITRC Forums.

Rita

..now if I could just get these projects done by March, maybe I could spend some REAL time out here...

[John Payne_2]

I think Rita hit it on the head:

Still employed.

Lots of people aren't or are under employed. You won't here me complain. (Too loud)

John

[Christopher McCray_1]

Hello,

One of my greatest achievements is making a successful transistion as a small-time Solaris/VMS administrator in the Army to an administrator of a enormous (by comparison) HPUX environment and have been successful. In short, I stepped onto the runway and didn't get sqashed.

Another, and just as important, I'm still (echo)employed, gainfully.

The greatest accomplishment in my mind, however not administrator-related, is being the proud father of two healthy, strong boys.

Regards,

Chris

[Robert DJ]

Hi,

The first Step or basic thing in all fields is to accomplish a certain tasks.....

One of the tasks accomplished widely was fixing a Tivoli Backup Server on HP.

Hope everyone are happy with all tasks and steps acheived till date...........

Lets Hope & Give the Best.

Regards,
Robert.

[Ken Hubnik_2]

Converting from an IBM mainframe shop to an all HP environment.

[John Bolene]

Getting my company to purchase dual EMC Symmetrix disk systems linked by URDF on the UNISYS mainframe. We normally had 1 or 2 disk related outages a month before, after conversion we finally had 1 disk related outage after 4 years. It also reduced my disk maintenance hours from 30 a week to 2 a week.

I have been unsuccesful in getting the same done for UNIX, but we do have a SAN solution in the works for next year. Hopefully next year at this time, I can report this as a success.

[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