My first week at Netinternet. The work is about the servers of customers who buy internet services from us. So part of the job isn't our own system; it's the systems of the people who stand behind the infrastructure we use.
On the first day they put me in a room and said "have a look at these". My first thought was: we already work with virtual machines at school, a server can't be that different. I was wrong.
A physical server isn't a virtual one on a whiteboard
When something goes wrong on a virtual machine, you can usually roll it back: take a disk snapshot, restore it. A physical server doesn't give you that luxury. All I had was the keyboard in front of the screen.
Things I noticed:
- Noise. The room isn't cold so much as loud — fan noise dominates. The sound of hardware that never stops running. A sound I never heard at school.
- Cables. Two cables go into each server: one for power, one for network. The power side is a simple topology with a distribution unit and a UPS. The network side is a switch and a lot of ports. Which cable goes to which port is not what someone who's only played games would guess.
- Labels. There's writing on the cables, and the same numbers show up everywhere. During an outage, that answers "which server?" far faster than searching for it.
- Several machines, one problem. On the first day someone said "this server won't start". It wouldn't — but the server next to it was fine. So the problem wasn't the hardware. Learning to make that distinction is something you can't learn on a virtual machine.
Understand before you touch
The senior colleague next to me kept repeating one thing: "Read first, then act."
The full sentence turned out to be: before changing a system, try to understand why it was set up that way. If you open something without knowing why it was opened like that, you can't close it. And if you do close it, at worst you'll never get it open again.
That's not something school teaches. At school, if you break something in the lab, it gets reset. Here there's no reset button.
The first month, in short
I'm learning to stand back and watch, to read, and to decide. So what you learn first isn't a tool but an order: what to look at, what to touch, and what to undo after you've touched it.
In the next post I'll go through the ten choices on the Ubuntu installer one by one — because even when the install looks finished, that's where the real decisions are made.