As expected, as soon as jarich called me to say that she's obtained the replacement parts for the flaky server, all symptoms and signs that there were any problems ceased.

That won't stop me from replacing its guts anyway.

Australia gets the DMCA
Last night, the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement went through. Along with many other things, this will include "harmonization" with US intellectual property laws, including trademarks, copyright, and patents.

Somehow I fail to see this being of benefit to Australia.

Sick hardware
A rather important machine of ours went through a number of unexplained reboots a number of months ago. We thought we had diagnosed it as a problem with the UPS, as removing it from the system resulted in sable operation.

Last night, the same machine experienced another set of reboots without any apparent reason. However this morning I discovered the culprit, after disabling the watchdog that was running. It appears that the IDE controller (or the kernel, talking to the IDE controller) completely dies, with many 'lost interrupt' messages on the console for three of the four drives in the machine.

Looks like I'll need to schedule downtime and replace its guts. Dealing with hardware is probably my second least favourite of all sysadmin tasks. (Restoring from tape is my least favourite)

Vanity domains
I'm now the proud registrant of pjf.id.au. Currently it just takes you to the PTA homepage, but it means that I now have a place to throw things that aren't really related to Perl Training Australia at all, like scuba-diving, edible flora, or beer-making.

It also allows me to golf myself an address that's shorter than my current CPAN address.

A few exciting things today on the Perl Training Australia front:

• We opened bookings for our new Perl Security course.
• We opened bookings for Damian's Advanced Object Oriented Perl and Text Processing with Perl courses.

Our list of courses open for booking is now pleasingly long.

Working with (superhuman) people
As I run a business, I get a lot of people telling me that if I have any work left over, that they're more than willing to take on the load in return for an additional source of income. These offers come in all three main areas of our business -- programming, sysadmin, and training. I'm very happy with this situation, it provides me with a greater range of opportunities. I like opportunities.

However, I very rarely take these individuals up on their offers, despite us often having a huge amount of work that we need to deal with. However it was only the other day when I realised why.

I tend to be very fussy and particular, and quite disinclined to hand work to anyone if I feel that I can do a better job myself. I'm even disinclined to let our accountant fill out the tax returns, instead I just mine them for knowledge.

This means that for me to offer work to another person, they need to have repeatedly demonstrated almost superhuman powers in their area of expertise. I want them to be able to do their job much better than I could possibly do it.

This isn't necessarily the best way to do business. Most of our clients don't know and probably don't care about the difference between well-written code and poorly-written code. Most of them don't even know what a sysadmin does, let alone if they're doing a good job of it.

It does, however, mean that I can sleep easily at night -- and that's worth quite a bit to me. It also means that when there's a close call, like a border-gateway machine with a completely corrupted filesystem, that I can trust the matter to be resolved effectively and efficiently. That allows me to spend the day doing more enjoyable things, like income tax. That's what happened yesterday.

Yesterday was SysAdmin Appreciation Day, and I really appreciate all the hard work that our two super-human sysadmins, Ian and Daniel have put in during the time that I've had the pleasure to be working with them. I hope to be able to get them down to a pub and buy a few rounds of drinks in the near future.