Slashdot Mirror
Scheduling Large Scale Server Upgrades/Outages?
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?"
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.
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."
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."
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.)