Ask Slashdot: System Administrator Vs Change Advisory Board

thundergeek (808819) writes "I am the sole sysadmin for nearly 50 servers (win/linux) across several contracts. Now a Change Advisory Board (CAB) is wanting to manage every patch that will be installed on the OS and approve/disapprove for testing on the development network. Once tested and verified, all changes will then need to be approved for production. Windows servers aren't always the best for informing admin exactly what is being 'patched' on the OS, and the frequency of updates will make my efficiency take a nose dive. Now I'll have to track each KB, RHSA, directives and any other 3rd party updates, submit a lengthy report outlining each patch being applied, and then sit back and wait for approval. What should I use/do to track what I will be installing? Is there already a product out there that will make my life a little less stressful on the admin side? Does anyone else have to go toe-to-toe with a CAB? How do you handle your patch approval process?"

Comments

Nonsense

[ruir]

They want bureaucracy, they make the paperwork. Tell them to track windows and distro security pages, the changes are there. I would be toasted with that kind of tape, I updated my servers in a pinch immediately after the first news of heartbleed at 3 in the morning. 0300AM right. How about dusting your resume and changing jobs? Let them play the shuffling reports game alone.

Re:Nonsense

[N1AK]

Any remotely well organised IT department will have processes for handling both emergency deployments and retrospective approval. I'm not going to be cheerleader for the concept of CAB but if you're going to make a case against it then at least make a reasonable one because hiding behind obvious nonsense like this will just make you look stupid and change averse to your employer.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Any decent change control process should have an emergency change category and process.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow reminds me of that joke where initially there's just one worker, then layers and layers of staff are added to manage that worker, then finally the worker is fired for underperforming.

Can't find it on Google or Bing though for some reason.

Re:Nonsense

[sg_oneill]

Back when I worked as a web administrator at my local university back in the early 2000s, the admin make-work types decided to bash out a web policy , mostly to keep standards up and guard against legal liability (Admittedly we had students setting up websites on chemistry lab pcs turned webserver with novel meth recipes and all sorts of shenanigans before that). All good and fine, I asked to be on the committee as an advisor, and so I was.

Then the whole thing went off the rails, every page needed to be approved by a department head, 10,000+ pages of previously existing data had to be retrofitted with full dublin core metadata descriptions, and so on and so on for about 400 pages of rules and policy that despite my best efforts I could not stop. These people had no fucking idea.

The crown was an insane rule that every new hyperlink had to be aproved not just by a department head but by the vice chancellor himself.

And so thats what I did, and I made sure it was done good and proper. I wrote a perl script that took all new pages on the webserver network (about 50-100 new pages a day) and then whenever a hyperlink appeared it spat out a 1 page document for approval *per link* requiring the vice chancellor and a lawyer to co-sign off on. All with witnesses. All in all about 400 pages a day of paperwork for the vice chancellor and a lawyer.

The policy lasted 3 days before I was dragged into the admin building to be ordered to stop producing the reports. I went in with my union rep. I said "Sorry , no , thats the official policy as passed by the university senate and the website will need to be shut down if this isn't done.". Since the next senate meeting was two weeks away, I made sure every god damn day that stack of paperwork was done by the vice chancellor for a glorious fortnight before the senate could revoke the whole damn policy.

It was a magical and golden time to be a union protected government (Universities are mostly run by the state in australia) employee.

For some reason later that year I was passed over for a promotion though. I wonder why, lol.

Re:Nonsense

[Opportunist]

This. Ask them if they have taken care of things like this. The answer to this alone will tell you whether there is some kind of deep consideration behind it or whether some PHB had a consultant toss the cool buzzword "change advisory board" in his direction.

If it's the latter, run. Run like the wind.

Re:Nonsense

[timepilot]

Dr. Seuss: “Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said "Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!". Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee. You're not a Hawtch-Watcher you're lucky you see!”

Re:Nonsense

[Antique Geekmeister]

> Any remotely well organised IT department will have processes for handling both emergency deployments and retrospective approval

Not when the architect is offline and is needed for every significant change. If there is going to _be_ a policy, a manager needs to be ready to enforce it, or it's going to be everyone making up their own undocumented and impossible to synchronize policies.

Re:Nonsense

[RabidReindeer]

They want bureaucracy, they make the paperwork. Tell them to track windows and distro security pages, the changes are there. I would be toasted with that kind of tape, I updated my servers in a pinch immediately after the first news of heartbleed at 3 in the morning. 0300AM right. How about dusting your resume and changing jobs? Let them play the shuffling reports game alone.

I've served on a change control board. Every application and system update was supposed to be bundled to make the sysadmin's job easier, include a document that outlined the nature of the change and why it was needed, the instructions on how to apply the change, and the instructions on how to recover if it didn't work.

Change committee met once a week, approved/scheduled, deferred, or rejected changes. In case of emergency, the CIO or designated proxy could approve an out-of-band change request.

We didn't attempt to micro-manage changes, just understand the business risks and rewards. Obviously, the more details you could capture the better prepared you were to understand the consequences and the ways you could recover. But when Microsoft hands you a CAB that includes patches for SSL, IE, 6 GDI bugs and Windows notepad, that's their problem, not yours.

The one thing that we didn't do (obviously!) was allow automated Windws updates. Then again, considering the damaged that some Windows Updates have done to desktop machines, I didn't even allow that on my desktop machine.

Re:Nonsense

[OzPeter]

So... the business made a stupid decision, and when they realised the error of their ways, rather than trying to reach agreement on the best way forward, you delighted in rubbing their noses in it, using processes designed to protect you to hurt your employing organization instead.

If he had said .. "OK .. sure I'll stop sending you those 400 pages of paper per day", then the policy would still have been left in place, and sometime win the future his employer could have used his inability to follow policy as an excuse to ream him over. Yes its CYA, but some employers are not above using any tool at their disposal to justify their actions.

Only by being a genuine PITA does the stupid police get removed, rather than ignored until convenient.

Re:Nonsense

[mysidia]

like this will just make you look stupid and change averse to your employer.

No... it's obviously just aversity to excessive, unnecessary and crippling micromanagement. It's obviously some idiots in suits who are change averse and feel they need to justify their existence by "approving" or "disapproving" of each and every required security update or patch or system admin action.

Which involves real costs. With this kind of bullshit, they need to hire additional system admins for systems to approach proper management just to deal with the reduced time efficiency and increased waste caused by bureaucracy.

Re:Nonsense

[rjune]

You should have asked for them to put that in writing. In fact, you should have made a written request for them to give you a written directive to stop producing the reports. Failing to generate the required reports would have given them grounds to fire you. What a glorious fortnight of rubbing their noses in their "Official Policy"!

Re:Nonsense

[Registered Coward v2]

So... the business made a stupid decision, and when they realised the error of their ways, rather than trying to reach agreement on the best way forward, you delighted in rubbing their noses in it, using processes designed to protect you to hurt your employing organization instead.

If he had said .. "OK .. sure I'll stop sending you those 400 pages of paper per day", then the policy would still have been left in place, and sometime win the future his employer could have used his inability to follow policy as an excuse to ream him over. Yes its CYA, but some employers are not above using any tool at their disposal to justify their actions.

Only by being a genuine PITA does the stupid police get removed, rather than ignored until convenient.

While what you say is true, it is not necessarily the best way to deal with stupid policies. In the end, the PITA gets remembered long after the stupid policy is forgotten; all people know is someone was a PITA and eventually will be made to pay for it. You could, for example, send all links on one page and have that be signed. After a few were signed its's time to broach the "is there a better way to do this" argument. Malicious compliance with rules generally results in pissing people off and payback at some future point; it can even be fun watching the PITA get a taste of their own when the opportunity arises.

Re:Nonsense

[MachineShedFred]

It should also have a method of implementing a "standard change" - meaning a change that repeatedly happens, and has a good track record of being successful with minimal fallout. Implement a WSUS test server for having a patch test environment, and point some less critical systems at it. Should anything go wrong there, you'll then know what patches to NOT apply automatically to the critical infrastructure.

Change management and review is there to help you, not be a pain in the ass. Remember - if they sign off on your documented change, they share the responsibility should something go sideways.

Re:Nonsense

[Ash Vince]

They want bureaucracy, they make the paperwork. Tell them to track windows and distro security pages, the changes are there.

Yep. They're the "experts". Just tell them the Microsoft KB number, that's all the information they need.

Yup, follow this advice and come across like an unhelpful douchbag.

Or, bend over backwards to help them. Provide them with a break down on every single patch (a few line summary with a link to the KB article for the full details), then give each patch a priority based on its impact and come up with different deployment routes for each one, then explain to your manager who allocates your time why patch management for the CAB board just became a full time job.

Also, if they ever reject any and you end up a dependency hell where you cannot install a critical patch because of a low impact one you rejected (you do test each patch deployment run on a dummy server don't you?) then explain why the process failed, politely, without saying thing like "I told you this was dumb years ago!".

Alternatively, if the system runs for a few months and every single patch sent to the CAB board has been approved then you can clearly demonstrate the do not really add anything and start making rational arguments to abandon the process from a sound basis while demonstrating you are an excellent team player who easily adapts.

But if you would rather come across like a non-team player who hates any interference in your system admin fiefdom then, just go with the douche bag option and watch your job get outsourced in 6 months.

In my experience the world of work is full of crap like this, times when processes that are overly bureaucratic are forced on us techies even though we clearly see them as a waste of our time. Unfortunately this is generally just stuff we have to lap up as part of our job, if you can, you generally end up earning more and with the greater long term job security that working as part of a larger company provides.

An excellent book on this sort of business related stuff is called "Who moved my cheese" and the gist of it is that you want to come across as and "enabler" rather than a "blocker". That often means trying your best to make what is clearly a stupid idea a success.

Re:Nonsense

[MrNemesis]

So refusing to comply with an order that's in direct violation of your contract is acting like an arsehole now? And you're happy for the rule you're being routinely forced to violate in the course of your professional duties to be left on the books to trip up the next person who doesn't have the guts to stand up and say "no, I won't shoot myself in the foot"? Will HR even remember you have a signed waiver before marching you out of the building for knowingly violating company policy?

Sorry, but no. If you're stuck in a Kafkaesque situation like the GP was, the only professional thing you can do is give them exactly what they want. Especially when you've explained to them why giving them exactly what they want will be bad and they've given a written response that amounts to "we don't care, do it anyway".

If you act like something that badly needs fixing doesn't need fixing and you're happy to see people and companies ruined over it, but all means keep thrusting ones cranium into the pulverised silicon dioxide. Some people might say you're acting like an arsehole however.

Re:Nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

This. We have a CAB. We got patches to be considered a routine process with specific scheduling - DEV on day X of the month, QA on day Y of the month, and Production split between days A and B. Submissions to CAB for automatic patches are FYI and made in batch.

Re:Nonsense

[RabidReindeer]

> The one thing that we didn't do (obviously!) was allow automated Windws updates.
> Then again, considering the damaged that some Windows Updates have done to
> desktop machines, I didn't even allow that on my desktop machine.

You have to perform OS updates in some industries. You might disable automatic updates, but that doesn't prevent damage, just that you'll be kicking it off manually.

Not always. Sometimes it's a matter of letting other people be your guinea pigs. Microsoft has on several occasions had to follow up an update with a corrected update, so in cases like that, you just ignore the bad update entirely and skip ahead to the better one.

The other thing deferred updates allow is the ability to do small-scale in-house testing before letting it loose on the entire infrastructure.

Re:Nonsense

[Ash Vince]

The crown was an insane rule that every new hyperlink had to be aproved not just by a department head but by the vice chancellor himself.

At that point you should have just emailed everyone on the committee, and copied in the vice-chancellor with some stats on exactly how many approvals this would generate on a daily basis. Include the actual statistics for the previous 7 days so if this was generating 50 pages per day you had some clear number to back this up while still in the planning stage. That was clearly why you were put on the committee, to stop a bunch of know nothings from coming up with a stupid policy, you failed.

The way to succeed as a techie is not about being technically brilliant any more, it is about how you can talk people round to your way of thinking and use evidence to back up your points of view.

Re:Nonsense

[plover]

"Yes men", or "enablers" as you call them, are the root cause of the out-of-control bureaucracy problem.

Management wants desperately to have processes that can be followed by minimum wage desperate people. They want to believe that they're incredibly smart and insightful, and that their knowledge of their business is so absolute and perfect that a process is easily applied to every situation. The enablers then create the real problems by saying "yes, we'll make this work," when they are actually lying. The problems then get worse, because the enablers also feel that every status report must be green, otherwise their process is not as perfect as they said it was.

The transparent lies breed more processes to control the mistakes that never seem to get fixed, despite the change review board processes. Nobody ever questions the process, because they'd be seen as a blocker. Change becomes impossible, because the middle-management process owners who have been lying "yes" will lose their jobs if their process is removed.

The process explosion reaches critical mass as each failed process begets two more to control it. The business goes into a death spiral of bloat and inefficiency.

Everything is painful. The smart middle managers flee early, leaving only the enablers behind, and they refuse to see or acknowledge any problems. The loyal people have their jobs turned into paperwork and outsourcing. With luck, the board will recognize the out of control costs, and bring in a lean outsider. An organization this bad off may need to fire 50%-90% of the people. Or the board may go the wrong direction, and outsource the whole damn mess, further eroding their ability to change.

This philosophy has caused more damage to business and productivity than any other idea, ever.

Avoiding this is simple, in theory. Tell the truth, and don't be afraid to change your mind if shown evidence that you're wrong.

Re:Nonsense

[mlts]

Another thing that might happen is that change management gets selectively enforced. One set of machines would be scrutinized where every change, even an addition of a drive to an array, would require a meeting and people signing off on the change, while the machines running a different OS would be able to be taken down, reinstalled, or otherwise modified at will without any paperwork needing to be done. (And vice versa.) Even SANs need to be documented because if someone puts both paths of a production box's MPIO links on the same drive controller, then reboots the controller, there will be Hell to pay.

Change management needs to be even across the board, be it SAN configurations, Windows, UNIX, router configurations, ASA rules, phone switch configs, VMWare configurations, and so on. If one group starts getting a free pass, then the whole system ends up being pointless come an outage that ends up being traced to undocumented changes in a part of the company that has gotten carte blanche.

Change management in even a SMB requires someone dedicated to the task of dealing with documenting changes. It requires a dedicated server, change management software, and someone who will maintain/backup/archive that. That server will be a PITA... until an outage happens and the fingers start pointing. Then, it can save a person their job.

Ideally, the change management software should allow people to put in their own changes. Say an admin is changing passwords or moving files from one filesystem to another. Might as well have a tool where items like that can be documented. Same with calls to a vendor for support, so later on, if something breaks, a simple search might come up with historical data.

All and all, a change management system is a good thing. However, it needs to be universally enforced with various grades of policies (emergency fixes can go on without approval, for example) for it to be of any good.

Re:Nonsense

[Registered Coward v2]

How is it his job to come up with the better solution? It was a legal/paperwork issue, not a technical one. If the Vice Chancellor and lawyer did not want to sign all that paperwork, they were the ones who needed to offer up the alternatives.

Perhaps because offering a solution to a problem rathe than just being a PITA in hope sit will go away is the professional thing to do? When someone just brings up issues without offering solutions it quickly becomes apparent they are not capable of the level of thinking needed to advance. They may be good at what they do but that's all they'll ever do; that may not be fair but it's the reality of most workplaces.

Re:Nonsense

[rnturn]

Having patches approved by a CAB should not be a big deal. A brief write-up of the patches to be applied -- or an attachment listing the patches, reasons for applying them, etc -- was all that was required. Every CAB I've ever worked with has a procedure for an emergency like applying a patch for something like Heartbleed. All it usually took was a phone call to certain people and getting a verbal authorization. (You filled out the standard change request forms after the fact.) Working with a CAB is no big deal. Really.

But speaking of pointless paperwork... We had someone in a QA role stand up in front of the IT group and tell us that they wanted a screen shot of every single patch installation for every single server the patch was installed on. (And the rest of the QA team nodded their heads in unison like robots.) When it was pointed out that the length of time required for making a separate screen shot -- signed and dated by hand to boot -- for each of the patches in your typical Microsoft service pack times hundreds and hundreds of servers and that such a process would be prohibitive (to say the least) they eventually backed off. If that initial request wasn't bad enough, they actually wanted the process to be: Install the first patch, take the screen shot, print it, label it, sign and date it. Only after those steps were completed would you move onto the next patch or server. If their plan had been implemented the company would have had to build a new building just to house the printed screenshots.

Re:Nonsense

[Anon-Admin]

I have worked for those companies. lol

27 page CAB form and full CAM meeting. Just to edit the /etc/login.defs and change PASS_MIN_DAYS from a 0 to a 7.

I still laugh about it to this day. A single character change and 27 pages of paperwork.

Re:Nonsense

[Slashdot Parent]

Yup, follow this advice and come across like an unhelpful douchbag.

Or, bend over backwards to help them. Provide them with a break down on every single patch (a few line summary with a link to the KB article for the full details), then give each patch a priority based on its impact and come up with different deployment routes for each one, then explain to your manager who allocates your time why patch management for the CAB board just became a full time job.

So you advocate becoming a passive-aggressive douchebag instead? If you don't have enough time for a new job responsibility, then you need to say something right away, not burn up a bunch of time of menial tasks and wait until your boss notices the productivity drop.

Alternatively, if the system runs for a few months and every single patch sent to the CAB board has been approved then you can clearly demonstrate the do not really add anything and start making rational arguments to abandon the process from a sound basis while demonstrating you are an excellent team player who easily adapts.

You know, it's interesting. My current client has a CAB process, and they do a good job of balancing process and agility.

Anyway, they don't use it to micromanage every stupid little patch. They recognize that the Linux admins are trained professionals and know which patches to apply. Same with the DBAs and same with the Network admins and same with the storage admins. Nobody questions them down to the individual patch level unless there is a known conflict with a specific patch, which basically never happens.

What they use it for is for auditing and coordination. Multiple groups never patch during the same maintenance window without a good reason (e.g. Heartbleed. Network and Linux both patched at the same time to get the patch out ASAP. But this was a rare event.). In other words, let's say the DBAs and the Linux admins both have patches that need to be applied. Well, they never patch during the same window, so if something breaks, we know that the problem is isolated to the database patch vs. the Linux patch. Also, if we get a report that something stopped working right on, say, 3/8/2014, then we know that the issue was with a patch to their main web proxy server.

CAB type groups can be a valuable, but it's important to find the sweet spot between micromanagement and chaos. It's good to have all of the various groups know what each other are doing and can advise each other regarding potential issues. It's not like when the DBAs do patching that everybody discusses the Oracle changelogs in great detail for half a day or anything.

Re:Nonsense

[godefroi]

The OP doesn't see the procedure as a liability. That's a lie. The OP sees the CAB as a threat to his authority. He sees the servers as "his", and this will remove some of the power he has over them.

The OP needs to understand that the servers belong to the company, and that the company gets to decide how patches are approved and administered. If the job changes into something he's no longer interested in doing, then he needs to move on.

Being an asshole administrator might seem like fun, but usually, in "normal" businesses, it gets you fired.

Re:Nonsense

[fair_n_hite_451]

Go directly to your Change Manager (not the CAB, but the person who is invested in the day-to-day management and running of the process).
Utter the following sentence "I wish to get regular patching of Windows Servers defined as a standard change, what do I need to do?"
Follow those instructions.

It might seem like more beauracracy for the first run through, but it'll be smooth and seamless after that. As a Change Manager for years, I can tell you that the people in that position are far more worried about project managers trying to push through craptastic updates at the last second than they are with competant domain support people. They'd love to get you off their radar just as much as you want to be off the CAB's radar.

Re:Nonsense

[MrNemesis]

This. Absolutely, 100% this.

As I've alluded to in my other posts, as soon as I graduated from cowboy sysadmin to a "proper" sysadmin that files change requests and writes project documentation, I've come to love change managers for precisely the reasons above. Change managers are under continual bombardment from non-technical project managers and developers that might well have deep, deep insight into a certain area but can't see past the end of their nose. A good change manager will often trot up to us sysadmins and say "So-and-so has submitted this change but doesn't think it needs approvals from you guys, can you take a gander?" to be met with either a "yeah that's fine" or a "Holy crappingon what-the-fuck in a god-buggered handbasket NO!". Good sysadmins in a constructive environment see a bigger picture than the project managers and the developers and, as far as CAB is concerned, submit better change requests as a result - because risk analysis is such an innate part of our job that most of us don't even realise we're doing it. But change managers see a bigger picture still because they're exposed to the sysadmins, network admins, security admins, user admins, mail admins, storage admins, admin admins, admin users, sysadmin networks, bread, eggs and breaded eggs.

Change managers exist to protect the business. Sysadmins exist to run the business' IT. Change managers realise that sysadmins are often asked to do dangerous or even outright impossible things by powerful people with only an inkling of what consequences such an action might have; it's a change manager's job to communicate with and understand the sysadmin (and everyone else) in such repsects, just as it's the sysadmins' responsibility to communicate to the business why change X is crucial or dangerous. In a properly functioning IT dept, sysadmins and change managers protect both each other and the business from stupidity, mis-co-ordination and lack of oversight. As a sysadmin, change managers are almost always on your side - either pushing for that change that's so essential, or holding you back where there's a risk. They're a highly valuable ally. When something goes to shit, they're the first people to step in and say "no, the sysadmins had nothing to do with this incident".

I'm MrNemesis and in the last three years I've learned to love my change managers.

Patching....

[Anonymous Coward]

What we normally do is get a blanket approval if its coming from the OS provider with an understanding that patching will be done on a specific schedule.

IE. If all the patches come from Redhat there is no approval its necessary to keep them up to date for security purposes. The same is true for patches pushed out from Microsoft.

Then your only dealing with 3rd party applications. Even those the more common ones we get added to the blanket approval, ie. Adobe. This way you are only telling them you are bringing them into line with the latest set of patches provided by the OS vendor without having to list all the packages that are being updated. Then they only have to ask you if a program has or does not have a certain bug.

Re:Patching....

[rioki]

I totally agree with the above. These change review rigmarole is often done for reasons of security and operational stability. This is a laudable goal, but often the added red tape make the entire system more vulnerable when they want to decide which security fixes get applies. You need to hammer it home that each second between the time the security fix is published and the time the fix is applied the systems are vulnerable. This is because, once the security fix is published, every hacker knows about the issue too. If you have something worthwhile to protect, which is probably the reason why a change review board was established, you do not want add more time to that time window. If they need red tape, you should get a blanket agreement that you apply security fixes from vendors for critical software (OS, databases, etc.) ASAP and they get a notification of when and what patch was installed.

Re:Patching....

[N1AK]

If you have something worthwhile to protect, which is probably the reason why a change review board was established, you do not want add more time to that time window.

No, CABs often get implemented because someone is worried about the damage a borked patch/update could do and doesn't have confidence that it could be reliably fixed quickly. Most of the 'admin' in a change request is things like a process plan (which surely you already know if you're deploying an update to a critical live system) and a rollback process (which again, surely you should be considering before risking fubaring the system).

What I will say is that you should ensure that the CAB members are aware of the need to be able to handle emergency requests (meet, agree and deploy in hours) and should have some process to handle retrospective requests if a business critical update comes out and you can't wait for CAB approval. Normally the requirements for retrospective requests is that it's genuinely critical and that you send a completed request before the update. It might sound odd, but the idea is that they can use that to see if you had properly thought through the process and not just gone Rambo on it.

Re:Patching....

[ixl]

In addition to the above two comments, if the policy changes the CAB is instituting impair sysadmin efficiency (and it sounds like they do), then the CAB should be held accountable for the effects of those changes. This means that they should have to find additional funding for additional sysadmins for these servers.

Re:Patching....

[Zocalo]

Blanket approvals and template documents that you can cut and paste notifications into are the way to go, especially when it's on a schedule like MS, Adobe & Oracle. If they push back, suggest a documented process (this is ITIL, right? You can avoid the need for a CAB if it's an approved and documented procedure) where you push the patches to a few test systems on Tuesday (in the case of MS) then deploy to the rest later in the week - whatever they are happy with - if there are no issues. Depending on your timezone Tuesday PM or Wednesday AM are good slots for weekly CABs to pick up this; push to the test servers on the day, then the rest at the end of the week. For *nix, i've done updates this way for anything that didn't require a reboot so only stuff like Kernel updates and major low-level libraries needed to get approval via a CAB.

For everything else, it's your call. Either the patch waits for the next regular CAB or you play the game and keep calling emergency CABs when there are justifiably critical updates, such as Heartbleed, or for the inevitable critical updates from MS every second Tuesday that impact your systems. The best tactic is to embrace ITIL and make it work for you, not allow them to make you jump through hoops and spend your time crafting unique documents for every patch. It also serves as a useful procedure check to make sure you don't mess up and have a contingency plan for when you do, and ultimately, if you get it right, you still get to dictate the schedule and make them do things in ways that you are happy to work with.

What helps...

[ProfessionalCookie]

ethanol.

Re:What helps...

[LifesABeach]

"...Is there already a product out there that will make my life a little less stressful on the admin side?..."

I was thinking along the lines of Meth, it's not going to change anything, but so what.

perhaps

[dimko]

New product your comapny requires is called: junior admin? Expensive stuff but does the job.

Always quit dumb jobs

[koinu]

You know that stress reduces your life expectancy? You have most stress with dumb supervisors/bosses. Go and quit there. This has also the effect that you've ultimately showed your position about it.

I do this

[beezly]

I have to do this and it's no problem at all, although our change management process doesn't sound quite as onerous as yours (I suspect yours will adapt over time -- the CAB will soon get bored if they have to approve every single OS patch).

I have to do a risk analysis for each change that gets made to a system (not just patches). Sometimes this risk analysis is fairly informal, for example if the change is to add more RAM to a VM, it's very unlikely to have a significant adverse impact and is easily reversible, so low risk. Other times the risk analysis (and processes that come out of that) may take a long time and require significant co-ordination with other parts of the organisation I work in.

A good example is if we make a change to a service that impacts the look and feel of that service. It will require co-ordinating with our communications, helpdesk, training and documentation teams as well as other parts of the technical group I work in and the CAB really acts as a check to make sure all of that has happened properly.

There are still a few people in our organisation who see the CAB as a barrier to getting work done, but for me it is really a check to make sure we're delivering changes in a proper way.

I can recommend you take a look at The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. http://itrevolution.com/books/... - I had quite a few "this is where I work" moments whilst reading it :)

Re:I do this

[beezly]

It needn't difficult at all and it doesn't have to impact your ability to apply security patches. For example, patches from Microsoft released on the 8th April were applied to roughly 500 servers on the 11th. A couple of hundred of our servers applied the software remedy for heartbleed within hours of it being released, without any intervention from a human at all.

A change management process should take into account an organisations appetite for risk. For us, we're keen to apply security patches quickly, so they are pre-approved by our CAB.

Re:I do this

[mysidia]

The auditor does not care if the patch may cause a work stoppage, if they are not fully patched, they are not in compliance, if they are not in compliance they get written up

Sounds like they need to fire and hire new auditors.

Setup a WSUS server

[will_die]

Setup a WSUS server, you probably already have the licenses. From there you can pull the patches to it and then push it to needed servers as approved.
There are commercial products that can also this in a nicer manner but they cost money.

Re:Setup a WSUS server

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, get the CAB to set policy to pre-approval any patches marked "security" or "critical". This can be configured within WSUS. That will cut the workload/paperwork down significantly.

ask yourself *why* and do the right thing

[flinkflonk]

This is known as the change process in ITIL, and it does have a remedy. The remedy is pre-approved changes (standard changes), which should include patching the OS with patches approved by the vendor. It's meant for exactly this situation, and if your change process doesn't have them it's just a paper wall.
The ITIL change process is all about reducing risk. If there is a risk with patching your OS (there is, especially since you mention Windows, it's not that unheard of that a Windows patch makes your whole network inoperative) you have to weigh it against the risk of not patching it (meaning you leave known security holes in).
So, my advice is to get OS patches for your OSes pre-approved by the CAB, that is, when a vendor releases a set of patches you are allowed to patch your systems in the way and the order of that pre-approved change. Of course it's paper-pushing, but use it to your advantage and push some paper yourself. If a server gets compromised and you have the papers (changelog) to prove that you followed procedure, blame will be placed somewhere else. And things will be done differently from there on, since it has been proven that the procedure didn't work, and everybody wins.
Or you could go find another job (like some other posters recommended) where you are the sole *cowboy*-admin and nothing gets done properly. Your choice really.

Re:ask yourself *why* and do the right thing

[Pikewake]

I've been involved in setting up ITIL processes for several organiztions and agree 100% with the above. The main benefit of a change process and a CAB is that you can get an overall picture of all incoming changes, compare it to the available resources and prioritize based on fact instead on who screams the loudest. Hope you have a compentent change manager who can keep that focus and avoid greasing the squeaky wheels.
If the CAB starts micromanaging they will self-destruct.
After you get your standard changes approved, just make sure that the CAB is aware of the time you spend on doing them. CABs tend to forget that any work they're not actively involved in approving needs time to get done.

Re:ask yourself *why* and do the right thing

[sjames]

What you needed was a CAB CAB to maintain the change procedure process document. And then, of course the CAB CAB CAB to maintain the change procedure document change procedure process document.

They might need to lay off their production people to afford another layer of CAB or two, but that's OK, with the constant change in the change procedure change procedure, none of them knew what they were supposed to be doing anymore anyway,.

micromanager jerk

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet your CEO or upper level boss is the typical dimwit/jerk, knows nothing about the business, microcontroller type of guy, stupid games of power, calls you on purpose once his secretary tells him you are out of the door. Small guy, stupid looking, may beard of a goatee, cheap-looking suit. Tell him to sod off and change jobs...

Run away!

[arcade]

Given your description, you're the sole sysadmin. This means you're the person who should take these decision - nobody else. If the company disagrees with this, then either you've done a poor job previously, or they don't trust you to do your job for some strange reason.

Now, if it's you that have fscked up on previous occasions, then it's understandable that they want the red tape.

If you haven't, then it's time to put down the foot and say "Nope, that's my job". If they disagree with that - linkedin should be a relatively short distance away, and after you find yourself a new job - simply hand in your resignation pointing out that you have no interest in having babysitters.

Re:Run away!

[SirDrinksAlot]

I think the real moral of the story is, not that it isn't his job but it's a job for a whole team. There should be an engineering team (testing updates, finding the issues and improvements etc) and a change/ops team who does the leg work when deploying these kinds of processes. One guy responsible for a big ass pile of servers and is also responsible for all of this other stuff is at least two full time jobs.

They have a point

[distilate]

As a software developer I have multiple times had a development box screwed over by an IT department pushing unneeded drivers and patches that cause problems. I say prove they are good or needed before you waste other peoples time. If you just want to push any random patch that comes along then you should be forced to resolve all issues without the traditional reinstall the machine.

Re:They have a point

[Anonymous Coward]

As a software developer I have multiple times had a development box screwed over by an IT department pushing unneeded drivers and patches that cause problems.

I say prove they are good or needed before you waste other peoples time.
If you just want to push any random patch that comes along then you should be forced to resolve all issues without the traditional reinstall the machine.

Er, waste people's time?

As a software developer, you have no fucking idea how difficult it is to pick and choose patches and driver updates to get pushed out to machines while also trying to maintain any sort of consistency with patch levels across the enterprise, but apparently this is something you want me to waste my time on in order to ensure you've not lost a spare second on the rare and random occurrence that you experience a problem in 1 out of 200 patches (my patching track record over 15+ years shows the frequency quite less than that)

And if you're doing patching correctly, you're mainly concerned about patches deemed "critical", so again, you're not really afforded the luxury of picking and choosing here without risk.

As a seasoned sysadmin, I have a fix for you. It's called VMs. Play till your hearts content and press the rewind (snapshot) button when find the environment screwed up (shockingly, it's not always the IT department that screws computers up...yes, I know this is breaking news)

Re:They have a point

[Anonymous Coward]

And you sir, are why most people hate IT.

In short, yes, I do expect you to waste your time to pick and choose which patches so I can not lose that spare second. After all, it's YOUR JOB to keep the computers running well. If you can't be bothered to do it, then what's the point of you being employed? My job as a developer is to develop products, not to battle with my machine. By you not doing your job properly and by approving a patch that takes out my machine, I'm now unable to do my job. And likely, I'm not the only person who will have been effected by this issue, so thus, by you not doing your job, you may have now cost 10, 20, 1000 people a couple hours where they're not doing their assigned tasks.

If you can't be bothered to as a sys admin, then in my opinion, a company shouldn't be bothered to employ you.

Re:Ask one question about patches

[csnydermvpsoft]

I'm sure that the "well, at least no lives were lost!" response will fly really well when a patch causes the company to lose $100,000 in worker productivity.

Re:Are you still partying like its 1999, or what?

[gbjbaanb]

oh god Remedy....I used that once.

But the concept is good- you need a 'bug tracker' where the requests for patches can be made to you, and you can then assign tot he CCB. Once they agree it, then assign it back to you for implementation.

Any dev bugtracker will provide you with this kind of audit trail - think 'requirements' for the CCB authorisation, 'development' for the implementation, 'test' for the testing. You might want to rename these though.

I'd make it web based so access is simple for everyone involved - last thing you need is a Excel based solution. I've used Mantis, or Redmine but Bugzilla would work too as would any number of web based bug/task tracker tools. Get one installed before someone on the CCB says "we'll use a spreadsheet", seriously.

Ha-ha!

[hsa]

In the voice of Nelson from the Simpsons: Ha-ha!

They want to make your work more transparent. Apparently, they think you have too much spare time, too. Or you getting fired/outsourced, and this is a gentle reminder to document your work..

Since all the reports are similar, I would just create a script to handle the documentation needs. I would also do extra work: create report how much this affects the efficiency of patch / hotfix distribution and how time all these process changes take (and maybe inflate that number a bit, just a bit).

This would also be a great time to ask for an assistant to ease the workload.

As a Change Manager...

[Pete (big-pete)]

I work in Change Management for a major telco, I chair the IT CAB, and I oversee server and client patching (amongst many other changes!). When we patch clients, we are patching up to around 30,000 real and virtual desktops - when we patch servers, they also number in the thousands.

There is no way we would allow a sysadmin to patch anything at any time without some level of oversight, an individual admin has no oversight on other patches, hardware interventions, application releases, network upgrades, business campaigns, etc that may be happening on our environment at any given moment (this isn't their job to be keeping track of all of that info). For server and client patching is as light as possible, but we still maintain a close oversight.

On the Wednesday following the second Tuesday of each month (for example), I sit down with the Windows server guys and the Windows client guys, and we review their proposals to patch - usually we have a fairly rapid timescale that we can meet to ensure that the patches are deployed (including pilot testing, etc to catch any issues before everyone's desktop is broken!), sometimes there are other major interventions that overlap, and then we need to make prioritisation decisions and decide which has priority. We have made similar agreements with the Linux teams, where they have a special process to patch, and we have close oversight on Unix patches, as upgrading these servers with a reboot can be a very big deal.

The last thing you want is an application version release of a critical ordering application happening at the same time as a system software patch, and then to have an issue afterwards - is it the application version, is it the systems patch, was there some conflict with the activties being performed at the same time? Troubleshooting gets more difficult, teams point fingers at eachother, and the whole time the business is screaming blue murder.

Of course in an Incident situation there is more flexibility to get things fixed fast, and with security issues I am keen to break open the S-CAB process to expedite a rapid approval flow to ensure that security holes are fixed as fast as possible - of course most changes are encouraged to follow the rules though, the change calendar is published, and everyone knows when the "standard" slots for deployment are, and if most people manage to schedule their changes within those windows, then it minimises potential conflict for everyone.

Change management are not your enemy, they are your friend - once you register your change with them, they have your back, they will guard from other interventions clashing with you, will stop you from inadvertently upsetting the business, and will decrease change related Incidents. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and Change Management need to find the right process for the right type of change - we cannot have a full in depth investigation into every configuration change, every patch, every bug-fix, every new server to be provisioned. A good Change Management team will guide changes to the appropriate flow, and grease the wheels for certain types of interventions - it seems that the CAB mentioned in the summary are still finding their feet a little, and I am sure they will evolve over time as they start to understand which changes are high risk, and which can be allowed to pass with a lighter touch.

-- Pete.

Re:As a Change Manager...

[Anonymous Coward]

OP is managing 50 servers, you are managing tens of thousands of Systems - the situations are hardly comparable.

Like the OP I am the sole admin for our companies IT (60+ on prem servers, mix of WinTel and Linux, plus 10 Azure hosted servers) and I am in charge of patch management.

If a committee in the organisation came and told me they were taking responsibility for patching away from me I would either tell them to sod off OR I would hand over all the admin accounts and wish them luck.

Re:As a Change Manager...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. While I wouldn't have a problem if it was just a matter of tracking when changes were applied for audit purposes, having to document each patch is completely unreasonable. In my case, we have various regulations that require us to patch our systems within a certain period of time, which we've translated into patching once a month. If I get asked for justification for installing a particular patch, it's usually "because if I don't the auditors will ding us for not installing it." If something needs to be done off-cycle or in an emergency (e.g., OpenSSL updates for Heartbleed), those get documented and rubber-stamped by our change control process, but beyond that it's assumed that regular patches are approved.

At one point it was suggested that for compliance I was going to have to not only document and justify all patches applied, but pre-document exactly which patches were being applied on each system AND show proof that those patches and ONLY those patches were applied on each system. Given the way that RHEL releases patches (not to mention Debian and Ubuntu, that would have turned a monthly patch cycle that takes at most a day or two into a full-time job. I pushed back, pointing out that it would do nothing other than create more paperwork and take time away from my ability to do anything else, and they eventually agreed. Yes, there can be a happy medium somewhere, and it's not the same for every organization, but the fewer technical people there are doing the actual work, the less this type of bureaucracy will produce functional results...

System Administrator Vs Change Advisory Board

[wonkey_monkey]

System Administrator Vs Change Advisory Board

50 quatloos on the newcomer!

Re:Are you still partying like its 1999, or what?

[sjames]

That's not the big leagues, that's the short bus.

yes, changes need to be documented. They should be deployed on a test server before going into production. The rest is just people who were presumably traumatized by falling out of a tree as a child seeking revenge.

Take the people in the CAB and replace them with extra admins who are bright enough to know what I said in the 2nd paragraph.

Change management can cover your ass

[Madman]

There is genuine value in a well-run change management program. Organizations need to know what is going on in their infrastructure, and plan things properly. In many industries there is a growing regulatory requirement to have change management, and auditors are looking for these things more often too. Many smaller shops are bringing in change control, so rather than handing in your badge my advice would be to deal with it and learn the lessons.
One lesson is rather than fight it, use it to your advantage. Yes, there's paperwork, however if you follow the system correctly they cannot blame you if things go wrong. What you thought of as freedom was also a risk to your own position as you had sole responsibility - change control means less freedom, but you are covered. Also, you can get budget for better management systems which will make your life easier. Put together a realistic list of what you need and get involved with setting up the change control process. If you stay silent or fight it you won't get a say.

Re:SCCM

[gl4ss]

sure, but how does that help with having to run the CAB through 102 patches?

I think go for easy solution. introduce the patches in batches for the board. ("monday updates for week 32").

the fucking board will not care after 2 weeks anyways so just do lip service for two weeks.

I'm not a fan of CAB

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for a Fortune 100 company. I'm not sure how CAB works at other companies but I get the impression that their implementation was flawed. 1) You could easily go around the process. 2) I'm certain nobody reviews the code - They just kind of discussed it. In my opinion this is a half-baked solution to prevent things from getting pushed to production which could cause problems (errors, leak sensitive info, etc). I am 100% confident that I could have gotten CAB approval for nearly anything. I understand the idea behind CAB but in my experience it isn't effective.

I actually quit that job partially due to things like CAB. Increasingly control was taken away from people in the IT department, and handed to things like CAB or to 3rd parties who managed our systems, databases, etc. The jobs of myself and others in IT staff were being reduced from "actually doing the work" to "submitting tickets and following up on tickets." Nothing like being on hold when calling the 3rd party for a critical issue you yourself know how to fix in 5 minutes. It's also a blast when I had to tell the support guy what commands to run because he wasn't familiar.

And no we didn't fuck up anything to deserve this treatment. It was dictated to us from upper management.

Must have missed the TLA

[Kahn_au]

Where I come from CAB stands for "Change Acceptance Board", they don't get to make dumb decisions...

Pre-approvals

[AndyCanfield]

Seems to me that you need to establish a list of pre-approved changes. For example, if you're running Windows and IIS, make sure there's a clause that says anything that comes down the pipeline via Windows Update does not need formal approval. That way you can offload the responsibilty, and work, onto Microsoft. You can keep your core software up-to-date. Third party software, same thing for corporations. Student projects and your own shell scripts might need more examination; not a bad idea actually. But if there's a new version of Firefox, why in the world would a Change Advisory Board think it knows more than Mozilla?

fuck this site and popups

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck this site and popups

BYE

Big company experience comes to small company

[erroneus]

Yes, I know how they are thinking and the pain you are feeling. To accomplish the implementation of this change management process you will need a lot of people working for you. Use this to your advantage. Quickly study up on the subject so your experience with the systems will not leave you with a dog pile of new bosses to tell you how to do your job. Instead insist that you need to hire more people to manage the overhead.

In the end that probably won't work and you'll be kept "at the bottom" where you are now.

These changes are going to be enormously expensive and despite all you have done, it will be perceived that you created this mess by not having a change management system in place to begin with. Of course, they will also see that you don't know about change management and will prefer to hire someone who already knows about it.

Now I'm not going to down change management processes. They can prevent problems and identify people who would otherwise deflect blame and hide in the shadows. But from what I have seen, you're just getting the beginning of the tsunami of changes.

Push for testing systems and additional hardware to support it. Of course it will also require more space and other resources. Try to get ahead of this beast.

Change Management is good

[MrNemesis]

...and necessary* but that doesn't stop some change management boards being needlessly obstructive.

Years back, I was working at a company where all of our servers got patched at build and then never patched again "in case it broke something". Myself and the rest of the ops team begged and pleaded for the business to allow us maintenance windows, allowed to reboot the OS outside of business hours, install patches... all to no avail.

Until the company lost a bidding on a contract because they had no maintenance or patch management policy in place so the business comes running at us screaming why we don't patch our servers (they would listen to their potential clients about computer security and whatnot, but not to their own staff). Cue us showing them the dozen or so draft maintenance policies that we'd submitted over the years, all of which were rejected by the directors. Red faces all round in that meeting :)

So the latest draft gets pushed into force by a wheelbarrow full of cash and we go out and buy Shavlik, a really rather nice patch management solution... and then our change management board goes nuts when they see our report. Lots of w2k and w2k3 boxes had literally hundreds of service packs and patches oustanding before, and like the OP wanted an individual change raised for each patch going on each server. We then set up an email direct to the change board that gave them Shavlik's automated PDF thingy which gives a list of all the patches outstanding on a server along with a hyperlink to the MS KB or similar... but that wasn't good enough. They wanted a report on what each patch did, which files it altered, all the usual stuff. Now as another poster had pointed out, under ITIL this should all have been "standard change" without needing so much paperwork (seriously, they should be at least aware of ITIL even if they're not going to follow it to the letter) but we could sympathise with them that, even with our planned dependency-based staggered rollout over a 4 week period, this was both a radical shift in company culture and posed a significant opportunity for breakage... but still. Filing about 20,000 change requests it was to be.

So obviously, since we were dealing with obstructive officials, we did exactly that. Did a few dozen hacky shell scripts that took the PDFs that Shavlik made, CURLed down the contents of the link to the KB page and then posted it off into the change management system - one request per patch per machine. After about twenty minutes of this we'd submitted about 400 requests and the change management system (an in-house pile o' shite that wasn't so much written as congealed out of various bits of sharepoint and was universally hated) had slowed to a crawl enough that it took 10mins to open the page. It used funky whizz-bang ajax to load *all* of the pending change requests in the background ("who needs a LIMIT on this SQL parameter?! We're never going to have more than fifty open change requests!" The developer in question also seemed to think that using a LIMIT statement was akin to taking the go-fasta stripes off your car. Wonder if he's doing webscale development now). After some brief arguing where they actually suggested we should open a change request to submit changes - at which point we cackled at the prospect of submitting another 20,000 pre-change-request changes - and after finding their ITIL manual down the back of the sofa they finally agreed that yes, actually, they didn't need quite such a detailed report, and were prepared to accept our risk assessment report as a single change for the first weekend's rollout.

So about 20,000 patches/service packs were staged and installed over the next two months, and luckily we didn't have a single failure due to the patches (yes, I also thought this was miraculous considering the crufty applications). From then on, every patch cycle needed just four changes, one for each week. That's how it should be done.

* Yes, necessary! I've done more than my fair share of JFDI but that just do

QA

[NapalmV]

This makes no sense unless you also have a QA department were all these patches would be tested. Then the CAB would need to get a list of the patches description, justification, and impact to existing enterprise applications. Based on this list they could select what can be applied immediately, bundled in a weekly/montly release, scrapped or postponed until a remediation plan is completed. Without QA results the CAB is useless.

What went wrong before?

[bwcbwc]

In my experience a CAB usually gets introduced in a small organization if something really got screwed up under the old process. There are exceptions - you could get a CTO who is gung-ho for ITIL, or you may have a new, important customer who insists on "process". But a CAB is an attempt to manage change and prevent problems in the working environment. So unless you have a better solution that will prevent negative impacts from your change process, go do the paperwork, with special attention to any risks or issues associated with the change (extended maintenance window, complex install or backout process, partial or incomplete fixes that still leave issues open). You can probably half-ass the CAB and get your work done almost like the old days, but when the next failed change occurs and they find out you hid risks or didn't do proper research, your ass could be out the door.

OTOH, if you really hate bureaucracy that much, hauling your ass out the door could be your best option - as long as you have a different career in mind besides sysadmin.

Servers are for applications...

[GoChickenFat]

I've been an admin for a very long time. What I see is a lot of admins think the OS is the most important and fail to understand why the server even exists in the first place. If you patch simply because it was made available, you don't test or know what the application the server is hosting does at all, then are you really doing what is best? Yes, patches break things and often the patch "fixes" something that was low or no risk inside the corporate network to begin with. Too many admins fail to balance the risks with application uptime. ...and that's why you end up with a CAB - to keep everyone informed, to balance risk and to account for audit controls. These usually pop up after too many system outages or lack of information sharing. Admins have a bad habit of being too smart and too busy to keep others informed. I have worked with a lot of CAB's in many companies and the best way to work with them is to be proactive in keeping them informed and to build a trust relationship in advance.

Re:Servers are for applications...

[david_thornley]

Thing is, while you get hold of that third party whose application broke because they were dumb, top management still wants the invoices that application produces to go out on time. A sysadmin should keep things running, not screw the systems up and blame somebody else.

Re:SCCM

[Enigma2175]

Yeah, after a couple of weeks of having to run through a few hundred patches at a time (make sure you write at least a page for each patch!) they'll get the hint that this is fucking retarded and back off.

I think and your parent underestimate the ability of committees to do work that is fucking retarded. I can't count the number of fucking retarded processes at my company that people have been happily doing for years.

Re:SCCM

[afidel]

Why write anything? Include the full expanded content from the MS KB article for the update, they generally run 1-5 pages each if printed on 8.5x11/A4

Re:SCCM

[DickBreath]

Just include the link. Don't bother with the expanded content. Make them feel like they are doing real work by having to click the link.

Bureaucrats need jobs too! They are a help to the organization in the same way that leeches are a help to their host organism.

Re:SCCM

[dowens81625]

I would suggest writing a php look up page where all you need to do is copy and paste the requisite KB Patch number, and it have it scrub the http://support.microsoft.com/k... article for related information and paste it into Re canned Letter.

Patch Request for KB

This patch is critical to maintain a stable and update to systems environment. Failure to approve and install this patch will leave your systems vulnerable to

Please note that after applying this patch

Please sign off as approved or rejected

Approved by

Printed name
Signature:
Date:

Rejected by

Printed name
Signature:
Date:

Sincerely your system admin,

Copy & Paste your KBs then proof read each letter make small adjustments where needed. Must most KB description articles are close enough with proper php scripting you should have no trouble pulling the relevant info from the page in the variables. and customizing a script with the info they want to see.

Print and repeat. Hand them hard copies, drink beer,

After they sign off on about 30 of them they will get tired and just say just do what you think is best and go back to doing your job.