11 May 2009

Rainy Days & Mondays


Karen Carpenter made the song famous for its authors, but clearly none of them were sysadmins

The rule, long known, for sysadmins is:

Never make a major change on a Friday, nor before leaving for vacation

I've been wrestling with the fallout from a violation of the sysadmin's rule by an upstream provider -- the vendor pushed in some change on Friday in the preparation of CDR -- Call Detail Records. For four days running, my sub-processes which manage the account have been failing for want of data. Those processes retrieve and apply CDR data, to emit accounting detail for customers, and have not been working

I've filed five or six sub-issue tickets which that primary change exposed, in trying to get the matter resolved: The current Firefox cannot open tickets under the current Windows XP, current SP [no problems with CentOS and FireFox or konqueror]; my 'closed' tickets were not visible; tickets were being closed by upstream before I confirmed a fix worked, so I ended up essentially re-opening the same ticket three times as each day's CDR pull failed; I was not receiving email updates of tickets; and so on. project managerI am quite sure they consider me a 'stickler for details' and something of a pedantic pest at the moment, but dammit, I'm paying their bills. The PHB supervisor may want tickets closed quickly; but I want my issues fixed first

... as no one likes to be called into work on the weekend to revert a change, the sysadmin's rule must be faithfully applied