I would be hung in effigy in the building lobby if I tried taking anything down at 1:30 in the afternoon on a weekday.
Just to plug a standalone desktop PC running as a group’s file server into a new UPS last year, I had to come in on Saturday. And put out an alert to the four affected users that their archived email files would be unavailable for five minutes. Down a server mid-day for maintenance? Great googly moogly…
The only time we can mess with something between 4AM and 7PM is if it’s sparking or smoking. (Like last month when a production application server fried two processors and 8 GB of RAM. Sun was flying parts and a technician in and we hoped to have it running by the next day. All I could tell users was the server was “impaired” - we have a corporate pox against “down” “failed” or “broken”)
I mean this honestly as a sysadmin with twenty years under my belt:
WHAT??? You are kidding, right.
I’d be out the door in a minute if I took the server down in the middle of the day for an upgrade. Thats what nights and weekends are for. Unless this is darn important (in which case, the message should have been “The server is going down in FIVE MINUTES for EMERGENCY MAINTENANCE”), these guys have fucked up.
Moreover, I need to have a pretty good understanding of what my users do to provide them with services. (Lets see, Dins - Goverment Attorney: Microsoft Office. Dependent on eMail. Litigation and Case Database? (don’t know what type of law you do). Internet connection. dial in access. Paid subscription to Lexis/Nexis. Do they still have all those darn subscriptions like CCH on CD Rom, or do you get that all over the internet now? - early in my career I filed the paper copies of those darn things into those little binders every month).
They don’t need to understand a damn thing about my job (and by Og, I hope they don’t - because then they start to try and do it - NT Servers under their desks lacking security patches spewing viruses all over the network). Computer services should be like the phones. You need to know that when you pick it up, there is a dial tone at the other end - not that the telecom department is routing voice traffic via IP over the company’s WAN.
I get appreciation every two weeks in the form of a paycheck. I get more of it when I get a raise every year after turning in steller “unscheduled downtime” numbers (all scheduled downtime is, of course, when users will be least impacted - and we really don’t have it any more thanks to clustering - we have a few minutes of “migration” time while services fail over to another node - and we do that at 5am or 8pm) to a boss that is understanding of what it takes to keep the beast content (virgin sacrifice). I’ve never given the guy who delivers snail mail to my cube an Amazon.com gift certificate for doing his damn job, and it would never occur to me to - nor to expect someone to give me one.
I’d be shitcanned in an instant if any of the equipment I maintain wasn’t up and running during business hours because I actually shut it down to make a repair that wasn’t absolutely immediately necessary (as in the power supply is smoking and I must replace it NOW).
In addition to my regular FTJ, I do some on the side consulting for clients who will and do call me at all hours of the night because something ‘must be fixed’. Anyone who could even potentially lose money or working hours because I did something so fucktarded as to drop their network purposely in the middle of the day would make god damn sure I never received another paycheck for them.
I am often referred to as ‘the guru’ or ‘Igor’ because I seem to do all of my ‘magical black boxy stuffs’ without anyone noticing it happened. Every now and then some jackass calls me at 3 am because they got a worm and can’t play EverQuest, and those problems can usually wait, but if I cost them the ability to get income, I am not useful anymore.
I have gotten some nice gifts of appreciation if I drop everything and run to a non-emergency situatio for a client, but the reality is if I planned a server change over in the middle of a work day, I’d be gone.
Well, I worked at home Friday just in case, but looks like I didn’t needed to. Everything is up and running great.
FTR, I know nothing about computers - so long as they turn on and do what I expect when I sign in. My buddy who does know something says we are updating to bring our system current to standards of about 5 years ago… Something about eternet… Only change I see in my office is a new blue cable running out the back of my CPU. I’m cruising the Dope quite smoothly this a.m., whatever they did.
And I am quite friendly with the sys admin. Heck, anyone who does as much non-work goofing around as I do had better be! I have found in my career that it goes a lot further getting along with support staff, techs, secretaries, etc., than fellow professionals and superiors. Sure, might not result in that corner office, but makes the day-to-day job go smoother. And IMO&E the percentage of assholes seems lower in those groups than among attorneys and management.
This was a long-time planned update, not in response to any recent worms, viruses, etc.
But it seems to me that doing an IT-like job will reasonably require some off-hour work. And someone going into that field should expect that. Heck, if a server needs to be replaced, give IT Thurs and Fri off, and have them do it over the weekend. Or give them Tues and Wed off during the day, but have them come in Tues at COB and work til its done.
Or, like I said, let IT take over the system during a workday. Just let the rest of us work at home until we know the system is up.
I’m late again with a comment, but I’ll make it anyway.
I would not be surprised if IT at Dinsdale’s office involves service contracts with outside vendors that govern when maintenance gets done. I work three days a week at a gov’t facility, and there are regular notices about routine server maintenance and the like being done during the work day, leaving people with no internet or email access for the duration. The last bit of non-emergency maintenance (which dragged on into the next day) provoked not a few complaints to the on-site contractor that manages IT services here. The head of the on-site contractor then promptly laid the blame for the delay at the feet of the outside vendor, who apparently would only supply support between the hours of 8 AM and 5 PM… so if your upgrade or whatever wasn’t finished by 5, too bad.
This doesn’t totally explain some of the IT follies we experience here (don’t get me started on the wisdom of routing internet access for a NYC office through Greenbelt, MD), but it does account for part of it.
Got to go with Dangerosa and Catsix. Dropping a server in work time just isn’t done unless absolutely necessary. We have enough problems with the servers going down of their own accord anyway (old, overloaded…).
I was in work all day yesterday (Sunday) working on servers.
