The first month at new job was hectic and I was so busy during the weekdays that could find time for my family, let alone creating a blog entry. Annanya, my 4 year old daughter missed me a lot as by the time I used to come back home, she was already asleep and next day morning again the same routine. Situation has eased down a bit as I have started understanding my servers and the organisational systems a bit.

On the first day itself on 26th Sep 2005 I was asked to move an LVM filesystem to a seperate physical disk. Not a difficult task, but since it was to be done in production servers, out of core business hours after 18:00 BST. I reached home at around 22:00 BST. And since then  I never reached home before 19:30 BST. Some people might think that this is normal in a SysAdmin’s life, but I got used to the luxorious life at British Airways where I used to leave dot at 17:00 BST.

Quite surprising that no proper monitoring system was in place except the HP Insight Manager and RRD-TOOL. The first few tasks which I initiated was to establish a HA monitoring station in place using Linux-HA project , Nagios, RRDTOOL , Cacti , Cheops. To start with I have been configuring and building Nagios in my development box which runs Slackware 10.1.

I also found that the only method of remote access to office network from home is using Cisco VPN client as we have Cisco Pix firewalls. I was finding it difficult to compile the Cisco VPN client for my  linux box at home due to I using the latest kernel and the client demanding 2.4. To provide myself a remote access I had to make use of OpenVPN without opening up any additional port on the Pix firewall. You can read more about that in my techlog here. Since my role was Linux Systems Administrator I decided to use Linux desktop for my self. I quickly installed Fedora Core 4 on one of the desktops and Slackware 10.1 on another. I decided to use the slack box as a test/dev machine to try out various new things.

Overall things have eased down a bit and I am really enjoying my new job and see a lots of opportunity.

Yesterday I got a call from BBC HR that my Work Permit has come through. Today I finally resigned from NIIT. Nothing much to say here, its just another milestone passed in life.

Finally I got the reference letter from NIIT yesterday and immediately despatched all the relevent documents to BBC for the processing of my Work Permit. A big sigh of relief. Things are changing very fast here at BA. Lots of politics involved with my position. Since the day I have told them that I will be leaving once my work permit is sorted out, I can see some kind of unrest everywhere. Or is it because I know I am leaving? Don’t know really. Will find that out anyway, but it looks from discussions with my team leader that NIIT may or may not be asked to replace me. Surprising, but don’t know what the contract they have with BA. Let’s wait and see.