Labor Day is here. Or is it Labour Day? When I was a kid, I would often
spell my words differently than standard American English. The teacher
would often write some comment about British spelling or a stranger
comment about archaic spelling.
I always had an air of mystery about me. There would be the teachers
whispering in the lunchroom about the enigmatic child, who couldn't
spell. Is he an old soul reincarnate?
Don't buy it? I don't either. I should have studied more.
Again, today is Labor Day. It is a day to reflect on the sacrifices made
by the average guy who goes to work every day. I have labored at many
different types of work. I've washed pots and pans, I've cleaned toilets,
scrubbed desks, and chalkboards. I sold Tandy Computers. I've taught
junior-high, preschool, college and assisted post-doctoral students and
university faculty with their research. I am proud to say that I labored
as an academic librarian for most of my working life .
No, I am not the person at the desk stamping your books. Nor am I the one
shelving books and pushing the little cart around. There were times that I
did those things. But, my work was largely behind the scenes.
For most of my career, I was at a screen managing the library servers
and online databases. Being the go-to guy when people needed to find
Internet stuff, the expert of the online world. (HA!)
For many years I was the sysadmin for a library's Sirsi Unicorn server.
Sirsi was a company at the time based in Huntsville, Alabama. They made
one of the first UNIX-based library management systems(LMS). Over the
years, SIRSI bought out and merged with other LMS providers. They became
the largest company in the field.
I liked the SIRSI I first knew. They were a smaller organization. I got
to know many of the people in Huntsville, including the CEO. I was
fortunate to travel to Huntsville a few times to commune with them.
One of the labors that I miss, strangely enough, is managing the LMS. It
was a challenge. The SIRSI system had this Z39.50 server. (I won't go into
details.) This server was used by many as an alternative means to
search the library catalog. And it was the primary source of system
headaches and bloodshot eyes.
The Zserver created alot of processes that never died. So, my day's labor
began at 5 AM from my home. There I would login to the LMS checking
reports and seeing if the system was still up and running. Often, I would
then turn from gentle, meek, and mild librarian into a process killer.
I won't recount the bloody details. It might be too much for the faint-hearted.
However, I enjoyed those morning exercises tracking the runaway processes.
It was challenging, sitting there asking myself, "Why the hell
isn't this working?"
Over the years, we tried to work around the Zservers problems. We could
never quite corrected its deficiencies. It was fun trying.
Sadly, we shut down that UNIX-based LMS and switched to a Windows-based
piece of %*^$*. I stepped aside from being the sysadmin and moved
everything to the cloud for someone else to manage.
It was a sad day when we shut our Unicorn down.
So, on this Labor Day, I salute all you UNIX sysadmins. You who are out
there keeping the Internet running, killing processes, fighting off
hackers, and ever so reluctantly rebooting a server. No one knows what you
do. There is an air of mystery about you. Enjoy it.