So here I am creating a template installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 server for use in VMware Infrastructure. I decided to check and see what Red Hat recommends as the default sizes for various filesystems such as /, /var, /usr, and so forth. Their documentation on this subject is amazingly brief. (At the time of this writing, the section is entirely empty.)

Thanks, guys. And don't even get me started on the whole installation number thing. I miss you, FreeBSD.

In the month of October, so far I've received about fifteen solicitations from recruiters looking for me to submit my résumé. These came in the form of e-mails (mostly through CareerBuilder) and phone calls at home and work. None of them have been through my LinkedIn as far as I can tell.

So far, none have been interesting enough to act on. Very close, but not quite. I'm not a big fan of Contract-for-Hire jobs, which is what a majority of them are.

From an IBM service request detail log of mine:

Status	Date/time received	Time zone	Description
CC	07/02/2007 09:08	C	Customer called. Indicates that the customer was called.
WH	07/02/2007 09:03	C	Will Handle. Indicates a Service Request Manager service person or a service vendor has accepted responsibility for the request.
DF	07/02/2007 13:00	C	Deferred Call - Customer has requested that service be deferred until: 07/02/2007 13:00
CC	07/01/2007 22:27	C	Customer called. Indicates that the customer was called.
DF	07/01/2007 21:47	C	Deferred Call - Customer has requested that service be deferred until: 07/02/2007 13:00
RC	07/01/2007 21:47	C	Received Request. Indicates that the request was entered into the Service Request Manager system.
DF	07/02/2007 02:47	GMT	Deferred Call - Customer has requested that service be deferred until: 07/02/2007 13:00

Since when are companies so willing to support you that they specifically disobey your request to not be supported yet?

Woohoo!

Today: Periods of snow with areas of blowing snow, mainly before noon. Some thunder is also possible. High near 32. Breezy, with a northwest wind between 21 and 29 mph, with gusts as high as 40 mph. Chance of precipitation is 90%. Total daytime snow accumulation of 3 to 7 inches possible.

It took my dad an hour to go 11 miles to work.

Check out our new webcams at work. Click on them to move them around.

Over the last 24 hours, I've been doing a small rollout of IBM Director at work. It is really just an initial stab at it, and I have it running inside of a virtual machine on one of the servers it monitors. That said, I have pretty much added and deployed every single agent we have. ServeRAID agent, Electronic Service Agent, Linux/VMware Level 2 agents, and so forth. I must say, it is pretty cool.

Last night, I setup IBM ESA agents so the systems could notify IBM of impending and actual failure. After getting the agents deployed, I clicked the button to send a test service request to IBM at about 1am. This morning when I got to work, I had a voicemail timestamped as 1:02am from a live person at IBM giving me an incident number, call back phone number, and notifying me that my test was successful. Insane.

Earlier this morning, I thought I'd do a real test. I went into our server room and pulled the plug on one of the redundant power supplies on a test server. I went back to my desk and noticed that IBM Director registered the critical event and had contacted IBM. After about five minutes of no phone call, I went back in to plug it back in. When I got back, I had a voicemail waiting from a nice gentleman in IBM's Atlanta offices notifying me of a potential PSU failure and giving me an incident and callback number. When I got around to calling them back a few hours later, they were going to connect me with the same guy who left me the initial voicemail. Apparently incidents are tied to IBM representatives, too.

I must say, now I understand why IBM hardware and support costs more. That is pretty freaking awesome. Now, if only I could find a way to simulate a predictive failure so I can see it predict impending failures as well...