Well, it has been a busy few months since my last post. My new job is still going strong and I have been very occupied getting things done. The new gig is a lot more Unix Admin oriented, along with the normal routine supporting Application servers and applications. Different type of applications than I am used to supporting with a totally different emphasis, so getting up to speed has been quite a challenge.
Still focused primarily on automation of routine tasks however. Apparently, I tend to do that a lot wherever I end up working. In this particular case, we have a very complex infrastructure setup and everything that has been done up to now has been oriented around manual tasking and documentation. My primary goal when entering the organization was to see what I could do toward automating those tasks. The original end-goal was just to try to setup some automation around starting/stopping of the various servers that make up different organizational structures within the company.

I was very pleased with the result. The full automation script features menus which pretty much allows anyone, even someone without any depth of unix knowledge to perform the routine functions of starting/stopping and activating new code versions on the system. The menus organize the selections into logical groupings. And, I have also managed to build in an infrastructure that accompanies the menus to allow us to fully automate those tasks as well, meaning that we can schedule them via a cron task and have them kick off automatically on a pre-determined schedule.

And, we have various health-checkers and the like on the servers to try to keep critical servers running if we have outages for some reason. The environment here is much more stable from my perspective, so the actual point of the health-checkers are to restart services that need to be running if there is some critical server outage. Just like in my last job, the core unix admin support is done by a separate team, so our particular interests in the servers are divergent. They only care about the hardware and OS while we are more concerned about the server processes that need to be running for our applications.

Couple that with some health checkers that we needed to monitor the webserver access to the appserver and some of the biggest tasks that I did at my last job needed to be redone here, albeit in a different fashion. Still, enough to keep me rolling along for the last few months. Various other trivia, like being on-call and some organizational changes have kept me hopping.

And, of course, I have sold my home and moved from one part of Atlanta to another. Set to move in and close on the new home on May 12th, and that has just been a true torture test for me. But, I am much closer to work at the new place so I am hoping that the stress of the move will be made up by the reduced stress of my commute. I really do like the new job a lot more than my previous one. I feel I am being challenged more, have more avenues for advancement and am appreciated more in my new position. And, I think that is very important. At some point, we have our basic needs met and really do want to feel like we are contributing something important to the world around us. I keep casting around for that and every time I think I have finally found something that will provide that to me, it tends to fall short.