Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:windows (Score 2) 265

OS choice is irrelevant. I've seen plenty of critical linux fuck ups in my day, and OS choice doesn't account for human error. And, being human, you WILL make human errors. You need a test environment and a backout plan. If you don't at least have a back-out plan and an estimate of how much the fuckup will cost BEFORE proceeding (and balancing that against the cost/risk of leaving it the fuck alone), you should not be carrying out the work.

Sure, that sounds like management speak, but seriously... cover your fucking ass. Because one day it will fuck up (whatever, the OS, this isn't just a Linux or Windows problem) and whilst the fuck up may not necessarily be your fault, the extended downtime because you have not tested and have no backout plan will be.

Comment Re: Murphy says no. (Score 4, Insightful) 265

This is why you build a test environment. VLANS, virtualization, SAN snapshots. There's no real excuse. Articulate the risks that a lack of a test environment entail to the business, and ask them if they want you doing shit without being able to test to see if it breaks things. Do some actual calculations on cost of system failure, and explain to them ways in which it can be mitigated. Putting your head in the sand and just breaking shit in live... well, that's one way to do it, but I fucking guarantee you: it WILL bit you in the ass, hard one day, whether it is automated or not. if you have a test environment, you can automate the shit out of your process, TEST it, and TEST a backout plan before going live.

Comment Re:Murphy says no. (Score 1) 265

Yup. Although, that said, if you have a proper test environment, like say, a snap-clone of your live environment and an isolated test VLAN, you can do significant testing on copies of live systems and be pretty confident it will work. You can figure out your back-out plan, which may be as simple as rolling back to a snapshot (or possibly not).

Way too many environments have no test environment, but these days with the mass deployment of FAS/SAN and virtualization, you owe it to your team to get that shit set up.

IT

Ask Slashdot: Unattended Maintenance Windows? 265

grahamsaa writes: Like many others in IT, I sometimes have to do server maintenance at unfortunate times. 6AM is the norm for us, but in some cases we're expected to do it as early as 2AM, which isn't exactly optimal. I understand that critical services can't be taken down during business hours, and most of our products are used 24 hours a day, but for some things it seems like it would be possible to automate maintenance (and downtime).

I have a maintenance window at about 5AM tomorrow. It's fairly simple — upgrade CentOS, remove a package, install a package, reboot. Downtime shouldn't be more than 5 minutes. While I don't think it would be wise to automate this window, I think with sufficient testing we might be able to automate future maintenance windows so I or someone else can sleep in. Aside from the benefit of getting a bit more sleep, automating this kind of thing means that it can be written, reviewed and tested well in advance. Of course, if something goes horribly wrong having a live body keeping watch is probably helpful. That said, we do have people on call 24/7 and they could probably respond capably in an emergency. Have any of you tried to do something like this? What's your experience been like?

Comment Re:My two reasons. (Score 1) 147

Blu-ray is better quality than streaming, sure. Most people don't actually care. Just look at the blu-ray adoption rate. I can stream 1080p youtube or 720 Apple TV content and do other stuff at the same time on a 16 megabit ADSL with zero hiccups. I was streaming AppleTV content (720p) with zero hiccups on a 6 meg sync back in 2010. And codecs are only going to get better.

Comment Re:"By Mistake" (Score 0) 711

95% plus of people are not interested in computers for computers sake. They may be teachers, scientists or business moguls. Not necessarily fucktards - just not interested in computers. For them, a computer is a tool like a hammer or a screwdriver, that they only use to get a job done. Fucking around with PC brain damage rather than spending their valuable time doing what they would rather be doing is something that Apple minimises for them.

Slashdot Top Deals

Never ask two questions in a business letter. The reply will discuss the one you are least interested, and say nothing about the other.

Working...