Somewhat unfortunately, tomorrow is the last day for our Unix sys admin. He's been a long-time contract employee, and he and the company couldn't agree on terms to come on board full-time. Two of his Unix servers are the Web servers, and several others provide services related to the Web, such as DNS and our software version management system (subversion). I'm the primary web programmer and am having to cross-train to cover those of his duties because (at least for a while) they don't plan to replace him.

I'm not looking forward to adding those duties to my own -- I already had plenty to do, but I'm learning a lot about Web servers and networking, which should enhance my value in a somewhat uncertain work environment. I hope that there's recognition that the Web server admin and support took about 1/3 of his time, and since he had a lot more experience than I do, it'll take more of my time than it did his. Also, those duties will introduce a lot more task switching overhead, so that a given volume of programming work will take more than twice as long as it would have in the past.

Anyway, not to say that I'm not long-winded anyway, but being knee-deep in learning about networking topics at work added to my level of detail in the troubleshooting description.