Socialtext

I spent the last 3 days in Minneapolis, MN hanging out with Brandon Noard.

We spent the week working on our appliance processes. We spent the first (half) day walking through a typical appliance install. I learned the basics of getting a new appliance from arriving boxed to ready to ship to a customer.

Thursday we worked on automating the installer. There were a lot of random things we have to manually do during the install that we went ahead and automated. Also, we went over a lot of the general appliance issues that customers tend to bring to us. Most of the things we went over are various customizations that customers need.

Friday was spent working on more automation, and working on getting the installer booting from a cd-rom. We didn't have a lot of luck on the latter problem. Making boot able cd-roms is kind of a pita.

Also, I created some new pages ( Appliance Install Quirks Appliance Woes ) to keep on top of issues with the appliances so that we can move towards a more die-hard appliance experience for our customers.

I'm kind of sad to leave tomorrow, having a flesh and blood coworker again for a few days was really nice, and I will miss it.

I felt bad because I was really low on sleep Wednesday and Friday, and I feel that I could have been a lot more useful if I could have been a bit more rested. Insomnia is really bad these days, I may have to look into seeing someone about it.

I think I'm going to take a crack at sleeping again. Tomorrow I fly back to Indianapolis and spend some time with my best friend Tim before I head back to my home. I haven't hung out with Tim at all for a very long time.

Also, I think this is the longest time I've been away from Jenn since we got married, so it's been a little weird. I look forward to seeing her on Sunday. :)

Brian, if you haven't seen SYSLINUX (and its brethren) you should check it out.

Some years ago I built a networked disk-imaging system from scratch using PXELINUX, and Anvin and the others on the mail list were really helpful.

contributed by chris.mcmahon@hidden on Oct 1 8:40am

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I have spent the past couple days reverse engineering a few bits of RT. I've been trying to automate a little of the mundane busy work that we inflict on the weekly support lead. It has not been anything too terribly complicated, but I believe my fellow support folks will appreciate the couple hacks I'm working on right now.

First off, I worked with Brandon today (He helped build the bridge from RT to prod in a way that didn't make johnt kick puppies) on putting the finishing touches on the first scrip I wrote. It's a very simple bit of code that runs Brandon's lookupstatus script against the requester of the ticket. This is something we were doing by hand for every ticket, and it was always a bit of a pain.

This went into production at the end of today.

Example: RT 27100

Right now I put the last bits of structure into a slightly more complex scrip that will eventually pounce on any appliance support requests. The scrip currently checks requester emails against a hash of appliance users, pulls out the Support contact (Brandon, Shawn, etc.), assigns the ticket to that person, jacks up the priority to 10, and then leaves a comment on the ticket with all the important info. The Support person gets the email that the appliance ticket has been assigned to them, and the customer gets a super-quick return time regardless of how closely support happens to be watching the queue.

This is not production yet, still needs work. But I think it will be very useful once finished.

Example RT 27118

I'm working on documenting the useful RT methods to call in scrips. There's not a large amount of Scrip documentation, most of what I learned came from perldocing random RT libraries and dissecting existing scrips on the intarwebs. Once that's done I'll drop links where they are needed/desired.

Pretty keen stuff.

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Small things I did on Friday

• Cleared floor space in my office for the incoming appliances.
• Worked on travel stuff for my trip to appliance camp.
• Spent most of the morning working on reporting fixed exceptions to people with existing tickets.
• Filed a small bug regarding handling on subjects when people post to workspaces from email.
• Started real work on my RT scrip. I'm working on automating the process of looking up a given user's status when they submit support requests. We do this manually right now. The reason for doing it is to prioritize our team's support response effort. Coding custom RT scrips has been extremely easy due to the dizzying abundance of documentation on the subject (laugh). Brandon's working on getting some of the needed infrastructure in place. Hope to have it working by the end of next week at the latest. automation++

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I decided to move my work blog to open so that I could allow my friends who don't work here at ST (yes, I have a couple) to read it.

This week has been fairly uneventful. I posted a somewhat whiny blog post last week about feeling useless, and I was assured that I'm doing ok, and that a lot of what I'm going through is just new guy syndrome. A lot of the time in support it feels like 18 different things are all going wrong and no one has the time to explain any of them to me. So I'll just have to press on and find my place here at this goofy place I've come to enjoy working for.

This week I got a real project; I'm going to be working on some RT scripting stuff. ShawnS is working on getting a VM RT instance going for us to poke at and break. So that will be amusing. I've never hacked much on RTs internals but I've been looking over the RT Essentials book a little and I think I know what needs to be done on the RT side of things.

It also sounds like I will be heading out to hang out with Brandon in the next few weeks to work on learning how to build and rapidly deploy appliances to new customers. I like playing with hardware, so I'm looking forward to getting my hands dirty. It's also going to be a great opportunity to finally meet a couple of my coworkers face to face. I really hope that once we have our face2face budget back that the support team gets a chance to have a face2face meeting in the near future.

I also got my laptop finally, so I'm once again back in the fast lane of social interaction. I was shackled to my desktop for the past five weeks and I was growing annoyed. It's nice to not have to be sitting at my desk using my desktop all of the time. Just being able to say "This room is distracting, I'm going to go work on the ( couch || deck || coffee shop ) is a wonderful thing.

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This is the first post in Brian Haberer's Weblog. Click New Post to add another post.

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