Caffeinated Sysadmin

Staying organized is never a one size fits all item for people. For me I have to use quite a few different pieces to keep everything together. The first piece is I read a book called  Time Management for System Administrators  (direct link to Amazon). Using some of the practices in this book, I was able to take a lot of chaos out of my last job. I worked for an MSP and every day was crazy. I started listing everything I needed to get done in a day. I used a giant white board and worked with my manager so that they could see what I was doing for the day at a glance. They would re-prioritize things with talking to me at times and we would all stay on the same page. The book talks about writing down all of your tasks and then ranking them. Since at times I would have different priorities than my manage, it was important for us to stay on the same page. A lot of times a good ticketing system would take care of this, but we didn't use our ticketing system for project work at the ...

After doing quite a bit of research on the subject, I found that there was not a lot of content in regards to how to handle a PowerShell build running in TeamCity and having it handle exits and errors correctly. Due to this lack of ability to find detailed information, I figured why not add a little bit here. Example of an Azure ARM Deployment with error handling in TeamCity: Yes, there are probably much better ways to handle this, but this is just a quick example of how we could write this. And no, it won't catch all issues with the deployment, but this is a work in progress. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 $DeploymentSplat = @ { "Name" = "TestDBDeploy" "ResourceGroupName" = "my-awesome-resourcegroup" "Mode" = "Incremental" "TemplateParameterFile" = "C:\Path\To\Arm\Te...