I’ve done some more work on the planning for the work we have to do to correct the problems caused by Slinky and his mate BIC, the base calculations would indicate that the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of the month would be the best time to complete the work. If it was possible to have a suitable outage this weekend, then two people could sort the whole thing out over the three days. There would be no server out for more than a day, the work could be done in one pass. If we are going to do this then the the planning will have to be completed for this Friday, it’s not a great omen with it being the 13th.
Still it’s the type of work that I used to do with my mate Adrian, only we did it all on trading systems which had to be pack in production when we told the customer that they would. It would be good to have some of the permanent staff with us but with the best window being the bank holiday weekend, I don’t actually see many people volunteering to keep us company and get weighed in especially if it will be three twelve hour days roughly to get it all done. How does it all break down, well we have to backup all the servers (containers) just in case! Then there is the deport and relocate all the servers (containers) to ensure that we have business continuity, if all of that goes well we’ll have to jumpstart and postinstall a number of MX000 servers and then pull every thing back in to the original servers and start all the applications.
I mean when it comes down to systems administration how easy can these things get, there will be a little flurry of followup work on the Monday but that shouldn’t take too long at all. I suppose I’ll have to complete the plan and get it all ready for approval at the CAB that will have to be done sooner rather than later, in the event that this is likely to be a runner I’ll be looking at preparing a Project Plan, a FMEA (Failure Mode Event Analysis) and two Hale Mary’s. It’ll probably all work out fine as long as we don’t suffer the death of a computer – or one of the systems admins.