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August 10, 2003

Sunday, Day Of Worshipping Computers

Every month my job requires me to perform off-hours maintenance on a designated weekend when required by my customers. I had a triple-whammy this month. I'd already planned to rebuild two NT4 servers with Windows 2000, and then the latest RPC bug came along and I needed to patch all the servers I support with the hotfix. I was up earlier than the crack of dawn (5am) and was on my first rebuild by 6am. I've been pretty unlucky with server rebuilds lately - anyone out there who works on Dell or Compaq server-class machines can attest to pains of a rebuild. However, things went relatively smoothly today, and I had both rebuilds done by 11:15am. In that time I also managed to patch and reboot 30 other servers I support across the country (and one in Canada, eh?) without any casualties. Getting home in time for lunch is a good thing!

This was good practice for when I'll really need to get home before lunch on Sundays - to watch football. ;)

Posted by Alex Harden on August 10, 2003 3:33 PM |

Comments

Been there done that. Ever upgrade a Unix server in an hour? :)

Seriously, the upgrade was just a matter of running the two boxes in parallel, then swapping IPs before 8:30am on Friday. Now, our old Compaq DS20 is now a dual-node Linux cluster.

Posted by: Don | August 10, 2003 7:51 PM

Lately it seems the Sunday maint is every other weekend. We are are in the process of upgrading from AIX 4.3.3 to AIX 5.2, fun. :)

Posted by: Scotbuff | August 11, 2003 12:39 PM

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