Welcome to Nowhere

Up side: It hasn’t been 4 months since the last time I looked at this thing. Slightly less up side: Academia and I have become incredibly close over the last couple months. to the tune of I may have to tell the next person I’m dating that I can’t marry her on account of I’m married to the college.

I’m in semester 3 of a 4-semester program, and it’s not slowed down for more than 5 minutes since I started. Which is awesome, if you’re me, but slightly less if you’re other people who may want to hear more than the occasional 4 words from me. But on the bright side, I’ve discovered exactly why I wanted this program in the first place–they grade me on my ability to do sysadmin related things. Which, well, I may or may not have had a small amount of experience with before my webfaction migration. Professor says make me an email server, to which my almost immediate answer is give me 5 minutes with Postfix. This is probably the most fun I’ve had at any level of schooling ever–and this stuff people actually want to pay me for. Since when is that a thing?

My time not spent in class is spent toying around with Ubuntu, usually for something exceedingly school related–like, say, the above mentioned mail server, or messing with windows Server 2008 because apparently someone somewhere thinks I want to get paid to set up and fix MS Exchange servers for a living. And that’s the way it goes until April, after which everything becomes optional until September.

Things I’ve had reinforced since this semester started, in no particular order:

• If you thought being a Windows user was an exercise in headache, spend an hour as a Windows sysadmin. Particularly spend an hour sysadmining a new Exchange server. I have not seen something fail so hard in my life, and I’ve seen a lot of fail. And when it fails, you are not fixing it with a reinstall–unless you’re reinstalling your OS. In short, pray it doesn’t fail. You’ll thank me later.
• Thoroughly tested does not necessarily mean working. If you’ve tested the hell out of your VM networking setup at home, then bring it into the school environment having passed all your tests, it *will* implode. And sometimes, it’ll look pretty while it does it. Go in with a plan C, because plan B will probably blow up right after plan A did.
• This is doubly true if you’ve got multiple network cards to play with–VMWare likes to break them both if it disagrees with something you’ve done to one. Then good luck figuring out which one.
• There are 80000000 ways to accomplish the exact same task. If you decide to do it the overly complicated way, there are 80000001. But if you break something doing it the overly complicated way, there are about 45000000000 possible points of failure.
• Things you should not do if you get to that point: send your lab partner an email that just says “I broke it”. Your lab partner is very likely to congratulate you and keep working on what he’s doing. Particularly if your lab partner is me.
• The world really and truly does run on caffeine. I thought it was a myth, even when I was working night shifts handling my 7500th call because the latest Windows update tanked something. Then I came to college. Nope, definitely not a myth. There be people there who consume far more caffeine than I ever have, and I thought I had a lot. Some of it’s justified–the workload will kill a lesser being, and some of these people have families, jobs, and actual social lives to attend to when they’re done. And some of us just don’t sleep. Ahem. *cough* Hi.
• And lastly: Whatever you do, however and wherever you do it, do not ever dev on the prod box. It is going to break, and break horribly, and when it does, they will hear your frustration down the hall. And some of us, having warned you it would happen, will probably be laughing as we head off to refill our caffeine.

This semester’s not done yet, and I’m already starting to formulate vacation plans and junk for when it is, but it’s things like this that are why I picked this program. It’s also things like this that are why other people tend to hear a whole lot less from me when I’m in the midst of said program–or, in terms of last summer, recovering from having been pasted to the wall by this program. Education is kicking my ass. But if I come out of this mess with even a little more than I had when I went in, it’ll be worth it. Now, about this caffeine thing…