What's He Up To?

It's once again quite busy here.

The Support biz locally tends to be cyclic - in the same sort of way as a wheel on a bicycle that's repeatedly hit the kerb. And the wheels actively change shape while you ride on them. (And you're on fire, and riding quickly through a hospital zone, being chased by helicopters and ninjas, and the ninjas are on fire too).

The service is also evolving - more focus on proactive incident prevention work, more focus on site visits, more focus on workshops, training, knowledge transfer. That sort of stuff. Should be fun. Interesting times, and all that.

Right now (in between crises) I'm trying to build a better hammer, by getting to grips with the Best Practices Analyzer tools, and the Server Performance Advisor, and I'm trying to work out what aspects of each can be automated into a low-touch log collection utility suite, like an expanded MPSReports utility.

Aside: MPSReports are da bomb if you're troubleshooting a problem (with apologies to echelon, nothing to see here, please disperse). Run the most appropriate MPSReports package first, get the CAB file it produces, and you're ready to do some serious log reading and troubleshooting. If you work out that there's a particular log or file or setting you're interested in, chances are you've got it already.

Back to the grindstone, many more fnjorkels before the day is out...

(Fnjorkel: Fictional "work minute". May or may not bear a resemblance to an actual unit of time.)