Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Interesting that nobody complained about Gail's post, which is almost 
> exactly the same thing...

Well, here's something funny. Or, at least, you get to laugh at me. :-)

We get yet another architecture of machine at work. Now we have 1U, 2U, 
and 4U machines all working. So I need to install Linux. So I install it 
on the new machines, and patch them to the latest release. OK, now's a 
good time to upgrade all the machines to the same patch level, right? So 
I patch the rest of the test rack to the current version, juuuust to 
make sure.

Damn. Stuff breaks like mad. Databases disappear. Machines that ran for 
six weeks start throwing errors every 20 minutes or so. Apache refuses 
connections from machines next to each other in the rack. I can't even 
get ssh to stay connected reliably.

I try debugging stuff, spend an all-nighter finding a fairly subtle bug, 
how to reproduce it, and how to fix it. Yay!  Damn, still doesn't work 
tho, leading to much more cursing of Linux, especially since it's 
inconceivable that a major release like SuSE could have such bad ssh 
behavior, so I know deep down it really must be my fault even tho 
(drumroll) I haven't changed anything. I really don't need this two 
weeks before I go completely off the air (and on the nitrox, yay!) for 
vacation.

I roundly curse Linux some more, back up the test database, and spend a 
day imaging all the test machines back to the same version as on 
production. And it *still* doesn't work. Now I'm completely lost.

I get booted off ssh yet again, try to log back in, and get a completely 
weird prompt I've never seen before.

Turns out one of the other guys had plugged in a router for the new 
machines, and it was randomly grabbing DHCP IP addresses from the ISP, 
usually managing to pick one of the test database server's IP addresses, 
and using it for its administration console.

Aaaahhhhh... Sweet relief. It was like coming down off a week-high 
adrenaline rush.

Plus, I got to learn how to save an update directory so in the future we 
can patch new machines up to an old set of patches, even if they're 
architecturally different. (Not that I want my job to be knowing such 
things, but at least it only took a few hours trying two wrong answers 
before the third one was right.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

Post a reply to this message