Week One

So week one was at the same time exhilarating and exhausting. It's been a long time since I was expected to be in one place for more then a few hours at a time. It's been years since I had my supervisors nearby, so learning to behave again is a great experience.

They started three new people on the same day, and set us all to the same tasks. I have this inkling that there's a bit of selection going on here, but I think I may be paranoid. We all sit at our own terminals in the middle of the room, and step through various configuration and repair options.

I registered a domain name (my old one, djuber.com, has now been purchased by some uber-dj to promote his gigs) beta-reduction.com. My webserver is completely hosed after all the changes I had to make to the server in the course of the administration worksheets. On the plus side, the email works, so sending to me at that domain will work. I'm not horribly sad about the misconfiguration, since at its pinnacle the page displayed a nearly empty wordpress blog. My only regret is looking incompetent because my server doesn't work and I haven't rescued it. At least no one around me seems to be doing much better. When they say they're done, and I ask how they did something, it looks like they just cut a few corners.

I have gotten a little better at using find (I never used flags with that before) and fgrep.

Next on my list of conquests will be chewing through the rather long gawk manual (my pdf version is just shy of 500 pages, and the chapter "Practical awk Programs" begins on page 245). Awk and Sed have been tools I've been putting off learning to use for too long. Additionally, I want to get through the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide. Then I will be an admin's admin.