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Scheduling Large Scale Server Upgrades/Outages?

Posted by Cliff on from the computations-best-left-to-computers dept.

thesandbender asks: "I've inherited my companies DST patching project and I have to schedule upgrades for 7000+ servers over the course of the next few weeks. Of course each group inside the company has different SLA's and outage windows. I need to somehow turn the pile of spreadsheets I have into a database and create a schedule that spreads the load over our pool of system administrators. There is no way I can reasonably accomplish this by hand, and even software for other industries/applications that could take a few steps out of the process would be appreciated. Does anyone know of a rule based scheduling system where I provide the available outage windows and a priority ranking for each system and the scheduler will recommend the order in which they should be upgraded?"

6 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. My advice: by Guppy06 · · Score: 4, Funny

    shutdown -h now

    Fuck the users! They exist solely to bemuse the sysadmin! Odds are they've been getting uppity lately and need to be taught a lesson, anyway.

  2. Procrastinate by mkcmkc · · Score: 4, Funny

    If you just put this off for a few months, the problem will probably just go away...

    --
    "Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
  3. Daylight Saving Time patching ?! by pieleric · · Score: 2, Funny

    Hi, I can't help you. I've no knowledge at all about this field. However, could someone make me a little bit less stupid and explain me those acronyms ? acronymattic has 197 TLAs for "DST" but I couldn't find the one which would fit for sure! SLA, that was standing for "Site Level Aggregator", right?

  4. Delegate by 4of12 · · Score: 3, Funny

    When computers get overloaded with work like this (host lookups, for example) they ask for help from other computers. As my stupid first try, how about asking each sysadmin to run a spreadsheet column of hostnames through an md5hash and let them convert servers with a '1' on the first day, 'a' on the tenth day, etc.?

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
  5. Re:Run away, into a hole somewhere by jazman_777 · · Score: 2, Funny
    This of course will require loads of admins to wait for 1AM, then push the time back to 12AM manually.


    How could this have been modded insightful, when everyone knows that you turn it back at 2AM?

    --
    Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
  6. Re:BladeLogic by Wog · · Score: 5, Funny

    How do you defiantly look at a product?

    SCREW YOU! I'M GOING TO REVIEW YOU, AND IF I LIKE YOU, I'M GOING TO IMPLEMENT YOU, AND YOU'LL LIKE IT!

    (Lameness filter says I have too many caps. But I think they were appropriate. Bah.)