Ask Slashdot: Unattended Maintenance Windows?

grahamsaa writes: Like many others in IT, I sometimes have to do server maintenance at unfortunate times. 6AM is the norm for us, but in some cases we're expected to do it as early as 2AM, which isn't exactly optimal. I understand that critical services can't be taken down during business hours, and most of our products are used 24 hours a day, but for some things it seems like it would be possible to automate maintenance (and downtime).

I have a maintenance window at about 5AM tomorrow. It's fairly simple — upgrade CentOS, remove a package, install a package, reboot. Downtime shouldn't be more than 5 minutes. While I don't think it would be wise to automate this window, I think with sufficient testing we might be able to automate future maintenance windows so I or someone else can sleep in. Aside from the benefit of getting a bit more sleep, automating this kind of thing means that it can be written, reviewed and tested well in advance. Of course, if something goes horribly wrong having a live body keeping watch is probably helpful. That said, we do have people on call 24/7 and they could probably respond capably in an emergency. Have any of you tried to do something like this? What's your experience been like?

Comments

I've toyed with this concept..

[grasshoppa]

...and while I'm reasonably sure I can execute automated maintenance windows with little to no impact to business operations, I'm not sure. So I don't do it.

If there were more at stake, if the risk vs benefits were tipped more in my company's favor, I might test implement it. But just to catch an extra hour or two of sleep? Not worth it; I want a warm body watching the process in case it goes sideways. 9 times out of 10, that warm body is me.

Slashdot is a Bad Place to Ask This

[terbeaux]

Everyone here is going to tell you that a human needs to be there because that is their livelihood. Any task can be automated at a cost. I am guessing that it is not your current task to automate maintenance tasks otherwise you wouldn't be asking. Somewhere up your chain they decided that for the uptime / quality of service it is more cost effective to have a human do it. That does not mean that you can not present a case showing otherwise. I highly suggest that you win approval and backing before taking time to try to automate anything.

Out of curiosity, are they VMs?

It depends on the size of your operation...

[jwthompson2]

If you really want to automate this sort of thing you should have redundant systems with working and routinely tested automatic fail-over and fallback behavior. With that in place you can more safely setup scheduled maintenance windows for routine stuff and/or pre-written maintenance scripts. But, if you are dealing with individual servers that aren't part of a redundancy plan then you should babysit your maintenance. Now, I say babysit because you should test and automate the actual maintenance with a script to prevent typos and other human errors when you are doing the maintenance on production machines. The human is just there in case something goes haywire with your well-tested script.

Fully automating these sorts of things is out of reach more many small to medium sized firms because they don't want, or can't, invest in the added hardware to build out redundant setups that can continue operating when one participant is offline for maintenance. So, depending on the size of your operation and how much your company is willing to invest to "do it the right way" is the limiting factor in how much you are going to be able to effectively automate this sort of task.

Re:Murphy says no.

[bwhaley]

The right answer to this is to have redundant systems so you can do the work during the day without impacting business operations.