Time to get a smartphone

So last night I was attending the wedding of my boss. It was a nice intimate setting and we were all getting a bit lit up from the fine wine and beer selection. At one point, one of the engineers comes over to me and states that he thinks that the database server is having an issue.

Well, this sucks.

Now, I haven’t received a call yet but he had just missed a call from our 24/7 NOC. This wasn’t looking good. Everyone who could respond to this was all at the wedding…and already well on their way to a hang over.

Luckily, the engineer that brought this to my attention happened to have Pocket-Putty on his PDA. This is where technology kicks ass.

So here I was in the middle of this wedding reception, hacking away on a freaking phone first hitting the bastion ssh server and then hopping to the DB server. The only real issue I had was that the keyboard was missing the pipe key so doing a simple

ps -ef |grep mysql

was not possible.

But, I was able to get things blindly restarted, called the NOC person and all was well.

I’m not sure at this point if a Treo or an iPhone is in my future. I’d lean more towards the iPhone since I’m a big time Mac user. But I’m definitely getting something.