Oh... goodie.

I just checked my mailbox. Ever check your mailbox and suddenly wish 
you'd checked it 20 minutes earlier?

Well anyway, we're supposed to be having a new MD at the UK site. At 
least, I've heard that there's going to be this guy. And about a week 
ago I got an email containing a document from HQ saying this guy starts 
on 1 Dec. But... there is no guy. I get the vague impression he's 
currently over at HQ having a talk with the bigwigs or something, but 
it's awfully quiet, so I don't really know what's happening.

Anyway, I opened my mailbox a little while ago, and... oh dear.

Apparently somebody tried to email this guy. But he doesn't have an 
email address. So they asked IT at HQ why the email bounced. And one guy 
is like "hey, I don't see this guy's name in the directory; what's up?" 
And somebody else goes "no, there's no account for this guy yet. Is 
Andrew in today? I see he's booked some time off this week... Hey 
Andrew, what's going on? Chris, why don't you go ahead and create this 
account if it hasn't been done already."

So now the guy has a user account. "Interesting", I thought, "does that 
mean they've created his user account in the domain at HQ?"

No. They've created it in my domain. They copied our current manager's 
user account.

Cool. I always love it when somebody does things to my domain without me 
realising.

But it gets better. There's a procedure to account creation - part of 
the reason why I hadn't created the account myself yet. (Apart from just 
not knowing what's going on.) I need somebody to hand me a form saying 
"Create an account for user X with access permissions ABC" plus a 
management authorisation signature. Obviously, this hasn't happened.

Myself I thought that was a bit of a mistake - but hey, how are HQ 
supposed to know what UK procedures are? (It's not like they're going to 
surf through the document archive every time they touch something to 
make sure it isn't covered by a procedure document...)

But it seems Mr QA is actually... quite upset.

Oh.

So now this casual email I'm writing to the guys at HQ just to say "hey, 
I'm not dead, I just didn't know what was meant to be happening"... 
suddenly I'm told to copy at least 3 other people in on this email, and 
it looks like becoming a fairly major incident.

Ahem. Let's reword this email a bit...

Jesus, what a way to stress out on a friday afternoon! o_O

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Here we go with your blog posts again... ;)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp escribió:
>   Here we go with your blog posts again... ;)
> 

Ask Chris Cason to create a povray.off-topic.invisible-blog newsgroup on
the server. Then tell us what he thinks :)



(I somehow think he won't)

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Interesting that nobody complained about Gail's post, which is almost 
exactly the same thing...

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Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Interesting that nobody complained about Gail's post, which is almost 
> exactly the same thing...

  It's not so much about the contents of the posts, but about their amount.

  If someone posts here about something funny that happened to him, that's
interesting and enjoyable to read. However, if someone makes 250 posts here
about 200 funny things that have happened to him in a relatively short period
of time, that starts slowly become a bit old...

  As I have said, that's what blogs were invented for. :)

  With this I'm not saying you should stop posting. I'm just saying that
perhaps you are overwhelming your audience. Too much too often can become
boring.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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

She's prettier than you.

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

...yeah, OK.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/

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Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Interesting that nobody complained about Gail's post, which is almost 
>> exactly the same thing...
> 
>   It's not so much about the contents of the posts, but about their amount.
> 
>   If someone posts here about something funny that happened to him, that's
> interesting and enjoyable to read. However, if someone makes 250 posts here
> about 200 funny things that have happened to him in a relatively short period
> of time, that starts slowly become a bit old...
> 
>   As I have said, that's what blogs were invented for. :)
> 
>   With this I'm not saying you should stop posting. I'm just saying that
> perhaps you are overwhelming your audience. Too much too often can become
> boring.
> 
Oh come on, it was one of the reasons for appointing him as a mascot. 
That in the mean time his habit has got a name does not change that 
original intend.

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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.

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Looks like your contribution is being noticed now, often times it does 
take an incident like this to get noticed....

Jim

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