How to keep CIOs under control

But at the time the calm is disturbed by a phone call. I take a sip of my double filtered Lavazza and pick up the handset. Jesus. Someone’s already calling me and I haven’t even had to the chance to check the CEO’s browser cache for that lesbian porn he’s as a matter of fact into. What gives? “You have to do something!” the urgent whisper comes. It’s Barry, the database admin in accounts. “What’s wrong?” I ask calmly. Barry’s a bit flightly sometimes. Comes from dealing with Oracle too much. It’s the hard drugs they give you at OpenWorld — they mess with his mojo. “It’s Vito,” he says. “He’s making all kinds of wild claims.”

“Yes,” says Barry. There’s a pause. I imagine him putting the phone down and poking his head up above his cubicle, checking for anyone listening in. Mentally I will Barry to calm the fuck down, channelling Larry Ellison meditating in his Zen garden, twin 22 year old bikini babes sitting with him on the Zazen mats on each side, their bleached blonde hair rustling gently in the breeze, appendages gently bouncing. Tranquil.

“We did handle him,” says Barry. “Nevertheless now he’s moved on to Fortescue and he’s talking to journalists again. He’s ” “ talking about driving a transformation program to align and straightway proactively deliver IT/IM services to sustain and grow the business. He wants to build effective teams that can meet growing demands by being innovative and not accepting the status quo.”

Mouthful of coffee out

“Guh!!” I spit a mouthful of coffee out, straight onto the keyboard. Damn. That’ll take a during to clean up. I make a mental note to get the Junior Windows Intern to do it. Surely he can manage that? But at that time . perhaps not. I mean, he DID study Windows Server — an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

“He’s talking about the cloud,” whispers Barry, his voice frantic now. “He says, in an article this morning, the days of the traditional sysadmin are gone. He says we’ll be replaced by cloud computing, with all services to be provided through the cloud.”

Across town one of the brothers at Fortescue will be receiving a system message on his desktop FreeBSD box from Skeeve. We all maintain limited remote login privileges on each other’s desktop systems for specifically these kind of emergencies. “The log files on the HTTP server are filling up with bullshit,” it will read. “Concatenate the file to /dev/null on the spur of the moment, excess output to overflow”. Overflow is my code name — I let one of the coders install a virtualised Windows Server 2003 instance on one of the development boxes once. The crew has never let me forget it.

Across Fortescue’s operations servers will be powering down, or simply entering infinite reboot loops, shell scripts set up precisely to this end coming to life like a million tiny worker ants, their eyes gleaming feverishly in the dark datacentre night as they go about their business. First it’s the email server, at that time the network file server, directory, app servers for HR, CRM and ERP, and even the IP-PABX machines running the IP telephony network. The print servers stay up, however they auto-randomise the output so on the spur of the moment, everyone’s print job is being printed a floor above or below from their location. It’s all perfectly synchronised, like a thousant ballerinas stepping in tune. A so then-set up system.

I tip back my chair and start up a Nethack instance in a terminal. I’ve just skilfully avoided several obvious traps and am about to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor when the phone rings again. Annoyed, I turn away from the terminal and pick up.

The cards for a during

“It has been on the cards for a during,” I respond. “By distributing the total computing load across several different nodes in disaggregated virtual machine environments, we were able to increase uptime, boost the efficiency dividend and implement an open-architected mission-critical collaborative environment, based on dynamic run-time principles which iterate automatically.”

I go back to my Nethack game. Ten minutes go by and I’m just about to switch to my afternoon task — setting up an auto-leave-deny script for the HR platform for any employees who have filed a helpdesk ticket in the past six months — when the phone rings again. “It’s Vito,” the shaky voice on the other end of the line says. Good, he’s able to find a phone number for himself — he’s clearly asked his PA. A smart one. “Is this my account manager?”

“Sure!” I say, in as cheerful a voice as I can manage, given that Vito has interrupted my important sysadmin work once again. CIOs are like children, in effect. Pity how any call he makes will redirect to my desk phone. Ah, routing tables. So simple, but so powerful. “How can we help?”

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