Friday, September 10, 2010

Friday Night Maintenance Gone Wrong

Tonight's events at work went very wrong. Regardless of preparing to perform what seemed like a few settings changes in the access level switch, the network filers and the virtual machine hosts, the evening did not transpire as smoothly, nor as quickly as I'd envisioned.

Without going into too much detail; I made some changes, some of my team made changes at the same time and several issues began to appear in various systems at different intervals. Was it my work that caused the issues? Was it the firewall upgrade? Specifically, what systems were online and what were offline? It was a nightmare.

After talking with my team and supervisor, we decided to roll back to a known good configuration of the switch and see where we were (ultimately, we would have rolled all systems back to previous states, if needed). After a reload of the switch, systems were finally coming back online and I was able to step through my required configuration changes, omitting one setting which caused the issue. (load balancing setting- ugh!)

After testing with trepidation, systems were online and logs were found 'clean'. We had a couple of anomalies to correct, but in the end, we were back on track to a successful maintenance period by 9:30. I'm still feeling uneasy about the events of this evening, but thus far, everything appears to be in proper order. I'll know more on Monday.

It appears as though God lifted us out of a real "jam" tonight and for that, I'm realy grateful. Now it's off to bed!

Luke 10:19

I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you.

Good Night

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