Another holiday weekend shot ...

[Donny Jekels]

how about sitting on I80 and having your weekend screwed by a drunk truck driver who decides to drive his truck into an overpass and caused both lanes to be stuck for 10 hours.

then decided to turn back home, and what a rain dump we got.

oh well, hope labor day will be beter weekend

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

My worst experience was giving a training in Cupertino.. I had arrived over very cautiosly 3 days before the training to set things up... now I love going to give/receive trainings abroad, especially meeting up with buddies and drinking the odd pint, long story short all was ready on friday morning, and I was just about to go out for drinkies, when power failure knocked out the whole lab - thing was every single box but one of mine survived! so I decided to do a dd when I found a replacement disk.. things went from bad to worse when I specified the block rather than raw. I got tired waiting at around midnight so decided to RS the box! damn 2 disks now failed! really! I left to go out for my pints because it was near closing and had to work nearly the whole saturday to get the things working. moral: BYOB!

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

My worst experience was giving a training in Cupertino.. I had arrived over very cautiosly 3 days before the training to set things up... now I love going to give/receive trainings abroad, especially meeting up with buddies and drinking the odd pint, long story short all was ready on friday morning, and I was just about to go out for drinkies, when power failure knocked out the whole lab - thing was every single box but one of mine survived! so I decided to do a dd when I found a replacement disk.. things went from bad to worse when I specified the block rather than raw. I got tired waiting at around midnight so decided to RS the box! damn 2 disks now failed! really! I left to go out for my pints because it was near closing and had to work nearly the whole saturday to get the things working. moral: BYOB!

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

My worst experience was giving a training in Cupertino.. I had arrived over very cautiosly 3 days before the training to set things up... now I love going to give/receive trainings abroad, especially meeting up with buddies and drinking the odd pint, long story short all was ready on friday morning, and I was just about to go out for drinkies, when power failure knocked out the whole lab - thing was every single box but one of mine survived! so I decided to do a dd when I found a replacement disk.. things went from bad to worse when I specified the block rather than raw. I got tired waiting at around midnight so decided to RS the box! damn 2 disks now failed! really! I left to go out for my pints because it was near closing and had to work nearly the whole saturday to get the things working. moral: BYOB!

[Mike Fisher_5]

Bill

Alternative Moral:
Arrive a week early
Bring a case

[Russ Park]

Change Control, anyone?

I have had several lost weekends as described in some very "familiar" sounding stories above. What kicks me in the pants is something far more insidious than the time lost to me and my family - It's the blame game. Have you been there? Try to go in as the hero, only later to find that you are on the hot seat for the problem? I'm sure we could spend hours on this one and grouse a while over a few cold ones. There have been some where I deserved to be knocked, but a few times too many, I've been the scapegoat for a few layers of management who wanted to deflect any criticism of their own ineptitude.

Moral? Never thought I'd hear myself say this, BUT I LIKE CHANGE CONTROL!!!! Since we've fully impleneted policies requiring me to schedule all of my work and lay out beforehand what I intend to do, I have no longer had any problems with the blame game. Why? Well, several layers of mgrs have to review and approve my work (some of my systems affect several thousand users). I even go to the trouble to include email chains noting my "customer's" request/reasons yadayada.

In the past, when things went wrong and I was doing some install or change, and this audit trail didn't exist, it was far too easy for the unlearned to begin questioning my activities. NOW, even when problems occur, my compliance with policy sheilds me from stupid people's assessment, and I get to deal mostly with competent technical managers who understand the nature of the beast. I resisted this policy as it seemed almost demeaning to have to get approval to do my job on a regular basis, but now I see things far differently.

What about emergencies? Our policy is that for production systems, even emergencies are tracked through the same mechanism, but I have 24 hours after-the-fact to fill out the ticket which in effect becomes a problem report.

Change control? It's a good thing!

-RP