10.12 Working with Local Support Engineers
The support engineers (SE) that bring CPUs, motherboards, and
other parts to you and install them into your servers when needed, should be
your best friends. These people are the ones that come through with parts in
a pinch, work late through outages with you, and are abused by you and their
own management as much as you are by your users and management. You don't
have to befriend them, but I think it is a mistake if you don't.
They are an excellent resource to have on your side. There are
certain things you want to target when these support engineers come out to fix
your systems.
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Get your local SE's pager number. This one is easy and
they will provide it if you don't abuse it.
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After gaining the SE's trust with their pager number,
target obtaining their company cellular phone number. It comes down to trust,
and you can use the fact that you don't abuse the pager. Wait to ask
for it when there could be an emergency situation and you might need to
be in contact with them at a moment's notice.
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There are
usually multiple SEs working out of a local office. Get to know as many
as possible and their phone numbers. Consider these golden numbers. You
will find that all the phone number of the SEs out of the local office are
one or two digits off from each other. When you have an emergency technical
question, and your SE isn't around, you can call one of the other SEs
and say, "Oh, I'm sorry, I must have hit your number by mistake.
Have you seen my SE around there? No, oh, I'm sorry to bother you then.
Hey, can I ask you a quick question while I have you on the phone?"
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There is always one SE on call during the weekends. If you
are aware of your SE being on call during one of the weekends, ask for the
number to the on-call pager. Tell the SE you will be around because there
is a huge demo with management that weekend and would feel more secure with
the number. If you get this pager number, you have struck gold! You
will now have guaranteed emergency access to any local SE anytime--24 hours
a day. This would be for an extreme emergency. Do NOT abuse it for any reason.
If you are assigned a new SE, fill him or her in on everything
you have. You want your SE to be ready for anything and to be familiar with
your configuration so that there will be no miscommunications or computer errors.
Give a complete tour. You're betting on the fact that he or she will be
your SE for a long time. You can sometimes have the same SE for up to three
years. If your SE is good, you won't want to trust anyone else with all
your machines. Write letters to the supervisor and to your sales representative.
Fight to keep a good SE in your territory at all cost. You might not get someone
so good next time.
The scariest thing
that I have ever experienced was the time that all the local SEs took off for
a retreat and a training course. The vendor sent a couple of first-level response
center support people, who had just finished their first two week hardware class,
to service hardware. Needless to say, I talked them out of swapping the boards
and I insisted that I do it. My seven working years on their systems took precedence
over their two weeks of training and experience with the company.
If you know days ahead of time that a major event will be taking
place such as a demo, year-end financial report, or something else that may
require extra special attention. Contact your SEs ahead of time. They have the
ability to schedule extra parts and make sure that everything will be ready
and setup in case there is an emergency.
Working with support
engineers is a vital part of system administration. Helping to keep the system
up and running along side us, they are an incredible benefit to have and work
with. When you put it all together, the support engineers, the sales and maintenance
representatives, our users, managers, and most of all, our families for support,
all make UNIX administration one truly awesome experience and it is a great
career to be in right now.
With UNIX being
over 25 years old, it has matured into an amazing operating system. I never
knew that the operation of computers could get any better than this and yet
be so much fun. I know we haven't seen anything yet. UNIX is only going
to get bigger and more powerful. I can't wait to see UNIX delivered to
the consumer and in every home. When this does happen, consumers will accept
no other substitutes. If you haven't chosen your career path yet, be a
part of UNIX system administration and experience true computing power like
no other.
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