The Life Of A Late-Night Sysadmin: Staring At Progress Bars

When somebody asks what I do when I’m at the office after-hours, I generally tell them “I stare a progress bars.” Generally, if I’m at the office after hours, it’s because I need to install patches, do system maintenance, copy a bunch of data, clone a hard drive, or something that requires it to be done when nobody else is using the server. And any geek who has done any of that type of stuff knows that it’s a lot of progress bars.

Right now, I’m at the office performing a server migration from old hardware to slightly-less-old hardware. I have Clonezilla running on the one server that supports it (Clonezilla is having issues with it’s RAID controller (which is why I’ve opened this thread), and I have Ghost running on another server (I prefer Clonezilla as it makes much faster clones). So here I am, staring at progress bars. An hour to go on the Ghosting machine.

Meanwhile, I can sit here. Waiting.

While I’m waiting, I tend to go through my RSS feeds, and read interesting stuff like like where to find gas that doesn’t have Ethanol, the A11 football offense, the Wired FOUND archives (I miss that section of the magazine), a well-written librarian’s response to a complaint about “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, and the plastic coffee on a local news show. I’ll probably also kill some time playing multiplayer minesweeper, a fun little album memory game, Totem Destroyer, and Monster’s Den. I also found it interesting all the cameras that were rolling during the L.A. earthquake last week, including Judge Judy, Big Brother, KNBC, KABC, City Hall and Judge Penny.

Back to check on those progress bars …