HMMMM…backup
I have written about backups before. Most recently here — http://www.paragon-cs.com/wordpress/?p=72
This is also about backups - but of another kind. This is about backups of your brain really. We had a recent issue that was prolonged because I didn’t put together getting paged at 7:30 in the morning with an on-going experienced problem. Whenever I have a serious problem I spend some time trying to figure out how to either:
a) keep it from happening again (if possible) or
b) minimize it as much as possible.
After some thought today I stopped by our local Target store and picked up a composition book that cost less than one dollar. Starting tomorrow morning it will sit on my desk and when I get paged by Nagios, close a ticket (which generally involves making a change to our systems) or do anything that changes our environment I will log it in my bright red 97 cent book. Not so glamorous, huh? No, not really. But I suspect it will be effective. Next time we have a serious application issue it will be easy to pull out the book and look back for the last few days of changes to see if there was some change initiated by me or something that had happened to the databases recently that might be causing a problem.
I suppose I could program some gee-whiz program to do all this and eventually I might do that, but for now it will just be me and my red notebook to backup my brain. Something to think about!!
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I use a wiki page. Each change is commented on briefly (usually one dot-point per change for each day). New stuff at the top, broken down by day/month/year.
It’s been moderately useful for comparing to changes in load stats, and for noting what previous values of settings were before I changed them.
We (the developer here at my work) have souch books too.
@mibus its not that easy to add notes to a wikipage
i prefer the composition book style
You need a workflow app. One of the things which is outstanding at Pythian is the internal resource of old tickets, truly an competitive edge. I work as a DBA there during my day…
What about just using a private blog, or at least using a wiki with a WYSIWYG editor.
Now if you can store the entries in a db, then you can start tracking for trends etc.
If you are going to use a book, make sure you spend time at the end of day quickly to review and more importantly weekly or monthly summarizing the past week and month.
That way you are not only backing up your brain but learning at the same time.
Have Fun
Paul