I managed to reach management in IT out in Ohio... and was bored silly - and then my guys started telling me I was "out of touch," because I hadn't been "hands on," in the datacenter in months - which wasn't wrong. 

I also like crisis mitigation. The most exciting thing I've done in IT in the last 10 years - a CIO I know of a healthcare called me up, got hit with ransomware - all their NUCs at their branches were locked down... needed me to go and hit all their NorCal branch locations, take machines offline, reimage them if possible - quarantine ones that were too locked up and send them back to corporate. 7 days, 12 branches, ending up in Sacramento, room, board and transportation included, 8 hours minimum at $250/hr even if I did 3 hours. I ended up spending about 12 hours typically - came home with a $15k check for 7 days, and got to visit family in Sacramento on the final evening - and did a bang up job bringing them back online. 

If I could do that consistently - 4 -6 jobs like that a year - I'd open a consultancy. But I really like crisis management. I feel the most engaged with that kind of pressure and deadline to bring a ship that is dead in the water back up to speed. 

And as you pointed out - with clustering and failover and imaging - those skills are also underappreciated now. 

Reminds me of an episode back in the mid 90s. Before ransomware really took off and became a daily event.

I forget the name of it, but it was a poorly crafted email to entice you do to stuff. Even back then normally we would 'eh, garbage' and dismiss it. However, at the time i worked with several people from the far east. In other plants we had some from the middle east. So, that it was poorly worded didn't really 'register' with them.  it started out with something like "love you"

Was sitting in the computer room and my exchange server load went thru the ceiling. We got flooded with 100k emails suddenly ( thankfully i was 'one of those people' and monitored my stuff, even back then ).  saw one of the mails, "oh crap" I yanked our network line to the rest of the world ( actually i broke it, i literally yanked the wire apart on the wan port. ) and literally ran across the office to the president's office and unplugged his machine while he was about to press enter on the message ( he was Japanese "it seemed odd, but i know him, and he was from India, so i donno" was his words ).  Ran over to the next executives office, same thing "yank". ( he was Chinese )  " ill be right back" and off i ran thru the office warning everyone. "corporate just got infected, dont touch your email"  

Was sort of funny, they both just rolled back and blinked. They trusted me, and figured it was really bad if did something that extreme ( which is out of character for me )..  turned out one of the people in another plant ( was also an Indian ) clicked, and opened the flood gates.   

Got my exchange server cleaned out in an hour, and updated some filters to kill any more.. But the rest of the company took days.   Put us back online so we could get to the mainframe up in Wisconsin and continue working, but turned off the exchange server until the smoke had cleared just to avoid the flood.

..and no, not slamming any of their heritages, but it does make 'translation' harder at times. Just a fact of life.

Sun May 03 2026 05:04:43 UTC from ParanoidDelusions

I managed to reach management in IT out in Ohio... and was bored silly - and then my guys started telling me I was "out of touch," because I hadn't been "hands on," in the datacenter in months - which wasn't wrong. 

I also like crisis mitigation. The most exciting thing I've done in IT in the last 10 years - a CIO I know of a healthcare called me up, got hit with ransomware - all their NUCs at their branches were locked down... needed me to go and hit all their NorCal branch locations, take machines offline, reimage them if possible - quarantine ones that were too locked up and send them back to corporate. 7 days, 12 branches, ending up in Sacramento, room, board and transportation included, 8 hours minimum at $250/hr even if I did 3 hours. I ended up spending about 12 hours typically - came home with a $15k check for 7 days, and got to visit family in Sacramento on the final evening - and did a bang up job bringing them back online. 

If I could do that consistently - 4 -6 jobs like that a year - I'd open a consultancy. But I really like crisis management. I feel the most engaged with that kind of pressure and deadline to bring a ship that is dead in the water back up to speed. 

 

I managed to reach management in IT out in Ohio... and was bored silly - and then my guys started telling me I was "out of touch," because I hadn't been "hands on," in the datacenter in months - which wasn't wrong. 

I hear that.  People say there's a point in technology careers where you supposedly have to decide to abandon the craft and become a manager if you want to advance anymore.

Depends on the company, really.  In 2014 I moved from production support up to "engineering" and then a few years later "architecture" and last year to an infosec role, and I've done well despite that very first transition being my exit from being a manager/supervisor.  The "lead engineer" path proves that there is a third path outside of support ticket hell and management hell.

Was sitting in the computer room and my exchange server load went thru the ceiling.

Dude, you know I have to say this.

"Serves you right for running Exchange"

:)

I didn't have a lot of say so at the time for that, tho i was working to at least migrate our file servers to Linux. Sort of stuck due to having to link to the rest of the company even if we were sort of an outcast. No pun intended ( we were a casting company ).

Also, this was mid 90s.... Not a lot of viable enterprise options back then.  Speaking of, my predecessor named the exchange server "Enterprise". He was a "Next Generation" fanatic, took me a bit to get things named something more coherent: Like "east_dock_print_server" instead of "worf'. but Enterprise = Enterprise email.. sort of ironic so i left it )

But to be fair, when we got hit, it wouldn't matter much what we ran.. 

Sun May 03 2026 22:24:29 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

 

Was sitting in the computer room and my exchange server load went thru the ceiling.

Dude, you know I have to say this.

"Serves you right for running Exchange"

:)

 

The place in Ohio ran Exchange. I got so good at it, I could create a fake, offline domain that matched our production domain, and bring the Exchange server back online there and do things that were not practical on the actual production Exchange server. That was hard - took me weeks to figure out all the things you have to get right for that to work - but once I did - I literally had the keys to the Exchange kingdom that an admin should have actually always had. 

I probably could have done something with that at the time - but there were other things going on in my life with my wife and kid, too... so I went a different direction. :) 

My production servers were pretty bullet proof - other than executives using them as file servers - and I was enough of a dick Admin to get that in check pretty quickly. 

Wed May 06 2026 09:09:39 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

Just like the rest of you, I became way too familiar with ESEUTIL, running it whenever Exchange blew itself up (which was extremely often). Real PTSD there, some of the most awful experiences.

Exactly that - and they wouldn't let me put quotas in - so I just kept buying bigger and bigger SANs... up to an IBM XIV. 
I mean, you can use Exchange as a file server - as long as you're willing to dump hundreds of thousands of dollars into file storage. 

Wed May 20 2026 14:08:04 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar

As in, they'd email things to themselves instead of storing files in file shares?

Yeah, set a real aggressive auto-expire on messages more than memo size.
That'll learn 'em.

I remember that some of the storage vendors even had Exchange Server extension modules that could stub out all the attachments and file them away out-of-band as direct objects in their array.

As if Exchange wasn't fragile enough to begin with.

I could write a better server in my spare time.

Oh, wait ... I did.

Pretty much what i have been saying all along. And the 'keep broken down into small pieces and well defined' mantra .. like real coders should do too.

Even tho i can do it myself, i also figure the time saved that it can type a hell of a lot faster than myself is well worth it. And i don't have to sit and think about it beyond basics, so that saves time too.  "how did that html tag work again, let me go look it up" or some esoteric regex crap that i can never remember details on, but the 'fundamentals' i do.. But knowing what i want, and in general how id do it, does help when it hoses things "hey, in this area here it should have been"  or "you missed this piece that does x in that function", go fix it.  It also helps people move back to the 'object oriented' style thinking, getting away from monolithic systems. ( and im just as guilty as the rest. tho my live with BPM/Workflows the last 20 some years has helped me move back into that way of thinking somewhat. )

Same goes for the music stuff..   Sure i could sit down and hash out the lyrics, style, format, bla bla.  but if it can spit it out in a manner of seconds, then i can go look at it and adjust.. its a huge time saver.  Even if i was still playing my guitars and asking for access to other instruments having it create audio for a 5 minute song in about 75 seconds... even if i do have to go back and re-edit a few times, well worth the time savings. and its not like producing is trivial in the 'regular' world either.  if i was still playing, having it create 'baseline' to work off as a model would still be a great time saver.

Similar for images ( or video, if i had the resources, but i don't ). Let it expand my own description more in the language the generator would better work with. 

Even chat bot help, its just a starting point.. for the simple boilerplate questions. When it gets complex, then you talk to humans. ( which can be just as uninformed or stupid )  

So many are freaking out its not even funny, but as of today its still just a tool, not a replacement. Everyone needs to calm down a bit and see what it can do for them, not fight it.  ( now in a few years. who knows, i may not say the same thing, but as of today... ) Saw this same attitude in the music world when synth and then midi came out as a practical tool and not an edge-esoteric thing, and just shook my head.  After the dust settled, it was being used everywhere and people don't think twice and no one thought it was a 'evil' thing.    ( same thing for electric guitars and the 'traditional artist meltdown' that occurred at first, tho i was too young to know that was going on to watch it in person )

And i'm rambling. sorry :) 

Sat Jun 06 2026 11:13:13 EDT from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: LMDB for Citadel

Most of the above paragraph has been my mantra for some time, but I've augmented it with the following wisdom: Only ask it to do things that you could have done yourself given a lot more time.

Ok i know it will piss some off. But going to talk about AI coding.  As we all know i'm not against AI for helping us do thing so im open minded about new options. ( i am against the invasion happening due to corporate greed/control but i don't blame the tool for that, yet )

I know there are things like Copilot for visual studio, which does stuff for you, but its Microsoft, and it costs. Claude, its also a huge corporate, and i think you have to pay there too.  Because of both cost and not wanting to run things in cloud with shady companies like that, i have stuck with local models, and 'generic' interfaces to them.  it gets the job done, but its not 'geared' toward coding so it can be a bit of back and forth at times, and a lot of copy/paste, tho recently the 'OEM' interface for llama.cpp added some native tools to do local file manipulation and don't have to rely on 3rd party tools.

There is a opensource project called 'OpenCode' that i have been watching, its growing fast. its geared toward coding.  Building plans, writing code ( and files ), can install needed modules, etc... can do inline batch testings, git commits, bla bla. It runs on both local and cloud models ( both theirs and the other cloud offerings ), so was another reason to watch its progression.  Recently they added a desktop GUI, so i thought id try it. Set it up for my local LLM, gave it a whirl. It ran faster than normal and did a great job with the little test i gave it.  Then noticed on another test it wasn't using my local server, nor trying to run on my desktop.  "wth? whats its doing? "  Turns out they have a free tier model as well as paid, and it defaults to the free. Tho easily switched to your own, or a pay tier. But even the free one, is doing a tremendous job.. and is quite impressive/surprising.  it has a token limitation of 200k which is nothing to sneeze at, but other than that i cant see any other limitation. I think for the time being unless i need more tokens im going to use it instead of my local.. at least until ( they claim they never will ) they drop the free tier. at least for code.. music and stuff, local..

Short version, is its well worth trying out. Tho it should be run in VM or docker or something as it WILL edit your files for you ( like copilot can do.. ).

And it takes a lot to impress me, as we all know. But man, i am in this case.