Maybe it's just big corporations, but every time I reach The last few weeks before a major project go live, It always seems like there is a rush to reach the finish line in time. And the thing is, I feel like I'm always the one who is remembering all the crap that everyone else forgot. Problems that I have dealt with *just* today:

• A-records were not setup in DNS for any of our servers. Apparently the guy who does that quit two weeks ago.
• Even if they were, none of the resolve.conf files had anything defined in them anyway. Had to take care of that.
• WebSphere complains when you can't do lookups. This means I can't federate any nodes into our cluster until the above is fixed.
• We still don't have a load balancing solution in concrete. You *kind* of need that to spray http responses when you are using multiple web servers.
• Nobody thought about purchasing the website's domain name.
• Nobody thought about purchasing the website's SSL cert.
• Nobody is thinking about how we are scheduling our batch jobs. I heard they purchased Tivoli Scheduling licenses, but at this point I'm about to use cron and be done it.
• And lastly, it would really be nice for the AIX admin to install bash, zip, unzip and less on our servers. I'm sick of ksh already. Heck, I have root, I guess I could install these myself, but I'm sure that would piss somebody off.

... but then I look at my paycheck and I feel much better ;-)

So, a few weeks ago I decided to play a little joke a work. It's been said that a large percentage of AIX system administrators simply can't administer their systems without smitty. I decided to put this to the test.

I was tasked with doing IBM WebSphere installs on several AIX systems for the District of Columbia's Medicaid enhancement project. As soon as the blades (yeah, AIX sucks) were installed and connected to the SAN, I was given root passwords. That's when I decided to have fun ;-) I mentioned to some of our Solaris guys that our assigned AIX administrator probably could not do anything without smitty (AIX's native administration interface). So I logged onto all 8 AIX servers and removed the execute bit of smitty.

I could only imagine his surprise when he logged on to find this message: -ksh: smitty: Permission denied
The even funnier thing is what happened later. He calls IBM support, and of course receives his PMR and is assigned a level 1 technician. He explains his situation to the support rep, and like a typical level 1 would he says... "Yes, we can fix this problem. First, become root and then open the smitty interface". Apparently level 1 support can only fix issues that can be fixed using smitty! It wasn't until the PMR was passed on to a level 2 support rep that the real problem was discovered. Gota love AIX administrators!