The day started out well, in the office reasonably early in plenty of time for the serving of Kippers. Shortly later we were advised that there was to be a new member of the Kipper Club, all was going to some kind of plan I thought to myself. The work for the day was mainly documentation, well as I’m sure you will agree this isn’t so hot – but it’s one of the tasks that you just have to do. So as the day progressed along came morning coffee and then lunch. still no disasters – things were looking up I thought to myself. Although there was some trepidation, this wasn’t the usual state of affairs – no problems, no panics, no users shouting and no reason to worry! Maybe the week would end on a high I thought to myself, afternoon coffee came and went – still nothing!
The team all started to drift home for the weekend, eventually I was the last person there – 17:30 arrived and time to leave. I wandered down to the car thinking about the free time I would have over the weekend, I got in the car and started my journey home – here’s where things started to go a bit pear shaped. No more than 15 minutes into my journey, the perpetual owner of the Sombrero called me – his opening comments were that he had made some changes to a server and rebooted it. My response, “I’m driving at the moment – I’ll call you when I get home.” Just a few minutes later I was calling from home and asking the first pertinent question, “what were you doing?”
Here comes the rub, well I was making some kernel changes and rebooting the system and it won’t come back up. Well the conversation went like this from that point on;
Perhaps you should call out the on call person.
I’m on call.
Why did you reboot the server?
I made some changes and had to test them!
Hmm maybe you’d better call the on call person
I’m the on call person.
OK then maybe you shouldn’t have been making changes that required outside intervention.
It was only a reboot after some kernel changs.
OK – why don’t you call the oncall person
Ah well that’s what you get for making changes on a Friday ninght.
Well came the response – I wish I wasn’t on call this week. So do I, I thought.