Wow, my first journal entry...
I've got two weeks until I'm out of my UNIX SysAdmin job. My company was bought by the BASF Corporation ("We don't make the things you buy; we make the things you buy better") and now they're closing down our research facility here in Princeton, NJ.
It's a sad time for all of us here. This was my first job out of college, and I've grown comfortable here. But maybe too comfortable. I've already fixed all of the major computer and network problems, and I've developed several great software projects. Perhaps it's time for something new and challenging again.
But in the meantime I've got two weeks to get everything shut down here. That includes making CDROM archives of all of our data -- so I'm burning hundreds of discs with a 2x burner. Thank goodness the burner lives in a CD jukebox connected to a UNIX, so I've written a series of Perl programs to automate the CD burning and some post-burn checks. I should be done with the data this week.
"Why use hundreds of CDROMs, when the data would fit on a few tapes?"
That's what I thought, too. But I'm not just making backups; I'm making permanent archives. And our IT staff considers CDROMs more reliable than tapes for permanent storage.
"Why not use DVDs instead of CDs?"
Actually I do have a DVD writer, but there very few DVD readers in our company. What's the point of making a data archive that nobody can read? Sigh.
