Best laid plans and all that

Despite a highly polished upgrade procedure, today's NQS upgrade went distinctly sour. After a near perfect install, we fired up the new software only to find the schedulers completely unwilling to initiate any new work. We searched our souls, or whatever passes for a soul in your average sysadmin, before eventually deciding to go for a cold start. Sure enough, just as soon as we'd trashed all the work and rebuilt the database, everything started working like a charm. Typical.

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Updated: It turns out I was wrong. ERS was working like a charm, but NQS was still so flakey that we were forced to regress the upgrade. Not good.

Rise of the librarians

The NYT reports that librarians are, as I've long suspected, uber cool. I've always rather fancied being a librarian. I guess it's the combination of access to large numbers of books, a quiet working environment, the opportunity to work with smart people, the chance to wear tweed — lots of tweed — to drink tea and to become a Watcher, that appeals.