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."
This used to be my problem ... for the DST change, we have thousands of servers and workstations to deal with. I was getting worried, but instead of taking it on, we found a PM and now it's their problem.
The moral of the story: never try.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
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.)