The BorD files, episode 12:

Now with more rm /bin/laden.

If the constant reader enjoyed the previous story, there would have been a phrase in there along the lines of how great it would be to work for IBM. I am STILL right.

It has been 16 or 17 months now. I am now with a unix admin team. I have taken a few classes. I am getting to be pretty good with AIX. I now support 5 different accounts, both internal and external customers. I am even more happy with this new team than I was with my last.

The oncall rotation has switched from being every 2nd or 3rd week with my old group, to every 10th or 12th week with my new group. I have DSL that IBM is paying for, and I work from home whenever I feel like it. (As long as we get our work done, I do not think anyone cares what you do or when you do it.) This solves my complaints about the snow. I just sit in my basement and work. I do not even know what the weather looks like outside. But I do know that it is finally getting cold again.

Actually the summer was very nice, and we had a much longer autumn than we did last year, so far the weather has been great. We have gone and seen tons of elk in the mountains, I think we finally feel at home here.

I have 5 machines and 2 huge monitors (IBM P260s) at my desk (3 linux, 1 aix, 1 laptop) so I am in geek heaven. I have mastered ssh and vnc, so I can export whatever gui I need to wherever I need to. Of course, working in unix, I do not have much need of a gui, but I have lusers that need to have things exported out of secured networks to non secured networks (ie from the customer network to their desks) and I can take care of all of that now.

I still marvel at how the wheel keeps getting reinvented. (There must be hundreds and even thousands of AIX admins at IBM around the world, but there is not a good way for us to share our knowledge and experience. I figure we all have our own ways of doing things, and we ought to be leveraging what we know and working on new problems..)

When I look around the basement and look at all of the equipment I have now, when I look around on the raised floors and look at all the machines I work on, when I look around my desk and see all the equipment and books and tools that I have, I am just amazed.

So things are good. The 2 year old now has an old pentium that I deleted linux from and loaded win98 on so that he could play some games. It is pretty amusing to me that a <3 year old child has a ton of bandwidth coming to his machine (of course he is on DSL).

Are there complaints? Sure. The place is huge. Management shuffles around like I cannot believe. I am on my 5th manager in 16 months. 5th office in 16 months. Things can get stressful. We have lost a few people and our workload can be pretty high. But I am learning alot and enjoy it for the most part.

Besides. The saying is, get a few years with IBM on your resume, and the world is your oyster.