Saturday, June 20, 2009
This Shit Just Keeps Happening
For the second weekend in a row, I'm spending a chunk of time doing after-hours work, mostly applying Microsoft security patches (they come out monthly) to servers and rebooting them. This happens every month, and is a duty split amongst my team. I probably have this responsiblity about once every three months.
In my patching work today, one of the servers didn't come back up after reboot; this happens probably about 10-15% of the time, and isn't a huge issue by itself because it's the weekend and I have until Monday to make sure it's back up and running.
Per standard procedure, I page the network group that is responsible for keeping the servers up. However, they don't have the server on their 'master list,' so they won't do anything. It's not on their list because we recently migrated this server from one IT group to another. I call the other IT group that, until recently, supported this specific server. They won't touch it because it's no longer their responsibility.
Furthermore, the tech I spoke to just happens to be married to a woman that works with the software on the server. He tells her that the application is down (which it's not; it's just this one server). She then calls her manager and tells her that the application is down. Which it's not.
Now, instead of a simple server fix, I've got a political situation on my hands. This application is very important to the business, and inspires a lot of paranoia because it breaks fairly often. It's fucking 7:30 on a Saturday night, and now what should've been a simple 10-minute server job has turned into a 3 hour+ drama, replete with my manager calling me at home and two different IT groups playing hot potato with the server.
In my patching work today, one of the servers didn't come back up after reboot; this happens probably about 10-15% of the time, and isn't a huge issue by itself because it's the weekend and I have until Monday to make sure it's back up and running.
Per standard procedure, I page the network group that is responsible for keeping the servers up. However, they don't have the server on their 'master list,' so they won't do anything. It's not on their list because we recently migrated this server from one IT group to another. I call the other IT group that, until recently, supported this specific server. They won't touch it because it's no longer their responsibility.
Furthermore, the tech I spoke to just happens to be married to a woman that works with the software on the server. He tells her that the application is down (which it's not; it's just this one server). She then calls her manager and tells her that the application is down. Which it's not.
Now, instead of a simple server fix, I've got a political situation on my hands. This application is very important to the business, and inspires a lot of paranoia because it breaks fairly often. It's fucking 7:30 on a Saturday night, and now what should've been a simple 10-minute server job has turned into a 3 hour+ drama, replete with my manager calling me at home and two different IT groups playing hot potato with the server.
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