Friday was my last day at the old job. It was a very bitter-sweet day. Eight years, two months is a long time to be anywhere in the IT world, especially since it has been my only real day job.
The weirdest part was handing in my key, swipe card and garage door clicker. My keychain is very light now.
I've been working in that space for 5 years. Where will I park down town? Will I ever see my servers again? What do I do with my guitar?
The IT team gave me a touching card and $100 give certificate. I'm going to miss working with those guys the most. Solving problems with them always gave me endorphin rushes. It will be strange not having a dozen other people within 30 feet to discuss ideas with.
We headed to a pub after work. I was surprised when 25-30 people showed up. A bunch of ex-employees from throughout the ages came out.
I officially start the new gig Monday. I'll have a few infrastructure things to work on (email, backups, etc). That will be easier than doing it at the old gig, considering there is only a handful of people to deal with it. Then, I think I'm going to be working on build automation and architecture design.
My plan is to experiment with Puppet and cfengine. I've been making complex kickstart files for a long time. The problem with those is that you only get one shot -- if you change your NTP servers, add an SNMP community or any other global config change you need to log into every system and update them. From what I understand, using puppet or cfengine, this is all automated for you.
It's going to be cool..
2 comments:
Hey Gary,
Sorry I missed the pub event on Friday...I couldn't make it for various reasons.
Good luck with the new job!
cfengine isn't bad - it's great for editing files in-place and such, but it's only single-pass and not very clever.
puppet is ok, though it lacks things like editing files in place (though I think that replacing files outright is the only way to be certain what state a given file will be in). Don't be surprised if neither tool does what you want, but puppet is far easier to extend.
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