We are nearing the end of week 2 of a staff strike here at the university,  and I don’t see a quick end in sight.  It’s discouraging…

In the absence of…well, everybody…there are 34 staff in ITSS, and…only myself and “the guy who knows all of finance / payroll and financial aid” are at work.  There is a deep well of dissatisfaction…and the staff are torn between that and a long-standing dedication to keeping things going.

And things are more-or-less going…because all registration venues were set up on a tight schedule to make sure it all happened before the strike happened.  And other people are not at work, but do…attend to critical things…

But…when you’re on your own, you start to confront all the critical questions of “how do I do X if Y isn’t here?”

Stuff like…

• where are all the network switch racks located in all the different buildings?
• who has the keys for all these wierd little rooms and offices
• …and if we know who, do they have the *only* set and are they on strike?
• We should have a CM system with logs that would let me find solutions to things like “oh, the link to department X fails because the UPS batteries for the WiFi link are dead, and the UPS won’t restart after a power fail”
• Is there a documented flow for the major processes?
• Do we know who does which bits?  Who has access to which facilities?

…and so on.  There’s a *lot* of institutional knowledge scattered through the collective heads of all who participate.  And when there’s a strike, and they don’t participate, it all turns into…ant-colony routing searches for answers.  And there’s a view of “bring in temp staff”…which ignores the “and what do they do, and who shows them, and…”

It makes me feel inadequate…I should have this all documented…as an IT department manager — and yet, I’m sure I’m 10x more on top of “the coalface” than a lot of my colleagues.

Even so…registration seems to work — and students are using web-based self-service…around the clock

And we are registering at a rate similar to the previous two years…

…cumulative tallies

…daily tallies

So far…

• I’ve reset I don’t know how many locked-out accounts
• Fixed two cabling problems (with the help of an outside “cable guy”)
• Diagnosed a systematic re-admission problem for returning students.
• Put up a semi-“real-time” dashboard to track enrolments per faculty / department / qualification and to compare these with the previous 3 years on a day-by-day basis.
• Written something to push Apache access logs from our web self-service app servers to a database & create a real-time “canary” dashboard that shows registration activity coming from various venues on a minute-by-minute basis for the last hour.

And I have a lot of interesting monitoring ideas that…I am trying to find time to tinker with…but that’s another post…