Re: Maintenance Window(s) Procedures

[Cal Frye <cjf () CALFRYE COM>]

David Gillett wrote:
>   "Can you do that while the campus power is shut down?" asked
> the dispatcher.
>   Facilities has been much better about giving us advance notice
> since then.

It certainly helps when everyone discusses these things well in advance,
doesn't it?

For our major planned outage, we've had many meetings with both CIT and
data stakeholders around campus, where the schedule has been thrashed
out and all voices heard. While we've taken advantage of the situation
to schedule multiple projects, we've not been too craven about it ;-)

Many of these projects are isolated, affecting individual servers which
have limited constitutency. Should one of these fail, it does not affect
the whole team nor the whole campus. I'm sorry I left the impression
this was a suite of global, major upgrades we were contemplating.

Those few projects that could affect the whole campus have the advantage
of scheduled downtime, failover or alternate services in many cases,
and vendor support onsite for the most crucial.

> If we're not fully
> operational when the window closes, we want to be as sure as possible
> where the problem is....

And I believe we completely share that goal.

Of course I'm nervous, who wouldn't be? But we think we've done
everything short of cloning the entire data center to keep things on track.

--
Regards,
-- Cal Frye, Network Administrator, Oberlin College

   www.calfrye.com,  www.pitalabs.com


"si duae res sufficient ad ejus veritatem, superfluum est ponere aliam
tertiam rem" --William of Ockham (1285-1349)