Slashdot Mirror
Dealing with Development House Disasters?
Skinnytie asks: "I was recently asked by the CEO of the company for which I work to find a resource from which to better understand what to do in the event of a disaster. 'I'm on it, Sir' was my response, and I ran back to my desk and started writing contingency plans and trying to imagine what to do if a meteorite strikes our co-lo facility. I quickly came te realize that there is far more that *could* happen (the CTO gets hit by bus, or the in-house server room gets abducted by aliens...you get the point) than I am even prepared to write plans for. I thought I'd hit the Slashdot audience up for some ideas/horror stories regarding avoiding, dealing with and getting past whatever disasters that have occurred at your development houses. Have at you!"
'I'm on it, Sir' was my response
A friend of mine once gave a response that was less gentle:
Sir, you just laid off half the developers, and half of the support staff, but you didn't reduce the marketing staff.
There is one manager for every 5 non-manager, we're still not meeting our financial targets, our new "Premium services" campaign is earning $1 for every $1000 we invested, we don't have enough tech staff to fix the bugs, the QA department was reduced to a single person and can't even find the bugs, and tech support is dealing with a growing number of irate customers every day.
We can barely keep up with the endless list of new tasks that you assign, sir, and you want me to waste my time daydreaming about asteroids?
We don't need a contigency plan sir, we ARE IN the contigency plan.
Get real, sir.
Still kept his job. Ok, maybe he wasn't that snotty...
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The Ceiling (Or floor to the party (Company sucess celebration) going on upstairs) of the server room fell in at my friends place of work, impaling their file server with a peice of rebarb(sp?) through the motherboard and a raid/ide controller card. All was well till the hole caught on fire due to what was later found to be a damages coffe cup heater that a stack of books had fallen onto. No one was seriously injured by the event other then the group of people who designed the building.
This was an architectural firm.
(Score:0, Interesting)
I was recently asked by the CEO of the company for which I work to find a resource from which to better understand what to do in the event of a disaster. (...) the CTO gets hit by bus, or the in-house server room gets abducted by aliens...you get the point
On the other hand, the CEO could get hit by bus, and you wouldn't have to deal with those disasters at all...
I worked at a large aircraft manufacturer in the Pacific Northwest back when Mt. St. Helens blew. They quickly imposed a "Volcano Disaster Plan" that, AFAIK, is still officially in place. We never followed it, however, because it included such mandates as turning off all equipment at night and sealing it up in plastic and duct tape just in case the building got dusted with ash. Yeah, right! (remember, this was 1980, well before a computer could fit in a garbage bag) It was bad enough for us with our CAD workstations and Tektronix terminals; I can imagine what the boys running the IBM big iron thought of that plan. Where are you going to find a plastic bag big enough for a 370 mainframe?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
It fills me with pride to know that even if an asteroid pastes me and half the people on earth, my TPS cover sheet templates will still be readable.
May we never see th
I took your advice and set fire to the machine room. I didn't warn anyone because it is supposed to be a realistic test. They didn't seem to take it too well when I explained that they had "done a very good job" on the test. The only server that was really toasted was the one I tested for the "crazy lawnmower man comes into server room and sloshes gasoline on prized IBM mainframe and dropps a match." Some people really cried about all that data loss but a test is a test, right? If people don't do backups then they are responsible for the data loss!
Unfortunately "they" didn't quite see it that way. I cleared out my desk this afternoon. Thanks a lot.