Well, we have talked about mentoring in the past, but we run into issues
with it. It's hard for someone just learning to spend tons of time being
mentored and we can't (and don't want to!) force them to either. So we
don't know who is going to be around for a while or who has time.
Not what folks are asking, but you can pick up a lot just by hanging out and watching the on-call person mutter to themselves in IRC ( not sure that is the right phrase umm... ) I don't know if this will translate for everyone, but there is a concept of "rubber duck" problem solving, where if you have a particularly difficult issue, and you explain it to someone, it helps you solve the problem more easily. I don't know if this is how everyone works and it really doesn't help if someone is jumping up and down and quacking while your are trying to think. I guess my point is, just hanging out unobtrusively when you can is fairly helpful all around.
do some
kind of intensive mentoring>
I wonder what it would be like if there were an apprentice slot for each
oncall shift?
For example, an apprentice is scheduled to be paged with the oncall
sysadmin, then at the least can shadow the syasadmin, help with
communication on IRC, do initial troubleshooting & monitoring with the
apprentice auth/access level, etc.
If I recall, alerts are pretty easily accessible. You can poke around on Nagios if there are issues. Obviously if everything is down/red, it's not a good time to ask for help with your ssh access.
Well, depends on the stuff I guess. It means that the oncall person not
only has to watch for and respond to pings on irc and triage tickets,
but then explain/teach a apprentice. If there is time and willing
apprentice thats great! If things are really busy, it could be too much
work to do at once.
I'm open to ideas here... we should all try and figure better ways to
get stuff done and learn and have a good time doing it. :)
kevin
A couple ideas;
- stream your terminal session when working an outage ( could be hard to find a 100% foss version that is secure )
- plan some outages in stage for apprentices to work at some time when tickets are low and nothing urgent is planned ( I don't know that I've ever heard of such a time, but in theory it could exist )
Of course, it's late here, so this may all turn out to be nonsense, but good discussion anyway.
-Zach
#aikidouke
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