Haphazard Musings

... cause I got tired of my blogs all saying Random Thoughts, so I hit the Visual Thesaurus online and found Haphazard Musings works just as well.

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My dad and stepmom celebrated their 30th anniversary on July 19th. That kinda fascinates me ... because I've had one relationship in my life last more than 30 months.

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For all you old-time CLI nerds like me out there ... here's another reason to vilify the drag-and-drop management that Windows Servers and related products have embraced:

I nearly re-imaged approximately 115 computers last week ... including 110 of those that were in production for three health-care systems. A quick & dirty estimate by one of the senior engineers said it would have taken us about a month of work to recover from that.

Whoa.

Yeah.

Wait. Howthefuckdidyou-'almost'-doTHAT? you ask.

Well, we're trying to create a new environment to build computers so they're individually built to hardware, rather than building a static OS image, but using a standardized script to ensure they're configured the same.

There's a product called Altiris we use to load the operating system and drivers for the nearly 3,000 real and virtual servers we manage. It's drag and drop. There are two panes - one holds the computers, one holds the jobs.

I went to drop the "deploy Windows 2003 R2" job on a folder in the computers pane named EB (cause that's me) but accidentally dropped the job on the ALL COMPUTERS folder.

Cause they're nested folders, and EB is right under ALL COMPUTERS.

And wasn't aware I dropped it on the wrong folder.

About five minutes later the first batch of incident tickets came rushing in telling us that 36 computers were down.

Then 36 more.

Then 36 more.

Then 5 more.

Then a guy I work with who knows more about the Altiris world and the blades I took down started looking into things and realized - QUICKLY - that things were amuck at the Circle-K.

And pulled the plug from the Altiris box, stopping it in step 1 of reimaging 113 machines.

So after I closed all the tickets that were created by my near meltdown of 113 computers, the next day I stopped at the liquor store and bought that man a very large bottle of Jägermeister.