Well I've successfully started a new job. It's officially the first time both my wife and I are working a day shift that is also in the same city. It's 'wheird' but ultimately very very nice. I don't think I'll ever miss working the night shift - or driving 2+ hours every day just to get back and forth for work.

The new job is pretty good so far. The previous sysadmin didn't leave much in the way of documentation so I'm kind of exploring the infrastructure. I've found several things that were in a broken state (most notably the nagios monitoring). What I haven't found myself, my workmates have brought to my attention (some that apparently have been waiting for quite some time to be completed). Nobody else, of course, knows what is going on with the infrastructure - they are all developers and have their own projects. I'm the sole sysadmin here (which wasn't really clear to me when I took the position) - but I'm considering it a big plus since I don't have to really argue my decisions with anyone :-)

I must say, though, the last sysadmin did leave me with a couple of very cluttered and messy server rooms as well as a broken laptop. Ah well, I guess if you're on your way out the door you don't necessarily feel the burn of success. I've since, re-racked to random servers, completed a fileserver migration and setup an appropriate ESXi 4 host to consolidate all those "white box servers" which someone apparently thought would be a good idea. I mean really - does dns and dhcp need their own xeon? What about nagios - I'm pretty sure a VM would do just fine for that. Besides that I'm not going to be using nagios - opennms is much nicer anyway - if you haven't tried it, I suggest you do; it is so chic.

AND OH - how about that lack on VPN! Remote workers have been using ssh tunnels to connect in and do work. I feel so bad for them - I'm putting together openvpn hosts for their individual environments. I have a feeling they will enjoy that quite a bit more.

Well, my viclient appears to be done installing. Enough of these shenanigans.