Re: Failover succeeds, again, and again, and again.

Bogdan Iamandei <chilia@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On 2007-07-28, Steve VanDevender <stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Steve VanDevender <stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I believe in letting people use as much rope they need . . . by spooling
^ as
it out from the high-speed winch that will be turned on some time later.

I have always wanted to have our Operations voicemail message consist
Shatner shouting "Why don't you all just GET A LIFE!"
^ of

My proofreading is really off today. I must be distracted. Maybe it's
the giant culminating "Identity Management" LDAP flop-over we're about
to perform tomorrow. Well, that and the general malaise and despair of
the orkplace.

AIEEEEEE!!! Identity Manglement... LDAP! Mommy! Make it go away! Aieeee!!
It Hurts!

What in the three hundred thousand circles of Chtulhu hell has posessed
you to do that? Bet it is something from Fha, isn't it?

Oh,... oh... don't tell me. I don't want to know.

OK, I won't. And it hasn't really possessed me, although it has some
tentacles snaking over my way. Another group has been doing most of the
actual work on the whole Identity Manglement system; our part is mainly
to reconfigure our systems to pull account data out of LDAP instead of
passwd files once they have all the account data loaded into it. I have
gotten a lot of shocked looks when I have described how we have mainly
just been copying passwd files around to make accounts work across a
bunch of systems, yet I can also say that it has worked much better than
I expected it would when I first found myself having to implement it for
lack of any better solution. Perhaps it is because I expected it to
work so poorly that I coded the distribution scripts so carefully, and
there haven't even been any noticeable glitches in the process.

Anyway, on Friday at a meeting we were having about our transition plan
which, at the time, was still scheduled to be executed on Saturday, they
said "since we're having trouble loading all the personnel information
into the Identity Manglement database, we haven't loaded any of the
information for disabled accounts yet, since they're disabled and
nothing in them is supposed to work, right?" It does save them a lot of
work; since we are a .edu we have approximately 25% account turnover
every year so there are a lot of accounts that are in some sense
"disabled". I had to point out that quite a few of those disabled
accounts had mail forwardings that were to intended last until the
accounts were actually deleted in a few months or so, and we might want
to have those keep working across the transition. So I ended up giving
them just a list of the accounts that had forwardings which they said
they would try to load first.

Saturday morning they discovered that they were still having problems
loading account data. So we got to sit around for a while until they
discovered yet another subset of accounts that were not being accepted
nicely by the Identity Manglement system, these being actual live
accounts that really were supposed to work, and so the LDAP flop-over
was a flop. We got to come to work on a Saturday for four hours of
nothing. At least I figured out how to win at that "Five Minutes to
Kill Yourself" game, and played a few nostalgic levels of Quake with a
current Linux port I recently discovvered, and got to have the rest of
my weekend free.

I guess we will be trying again in a few weeks, which should give them
enough time to load in all the account data for real. I am also asking
that we actually validate that the account data in LDAP matches the data
currently in our passwd files (with any exceptions carefully accounted
for and explained) some days before we actually attempt the next
flop-over.

More orkplace crap that depresses me: $PHB is continuing her haphazard
campaign to impose a dress code on all her orkers. The most senior
member of our systems group has been asked to wear pants in the
orkplace. He is basically an aging hippie who is an extremely nice guy
and has been far nicer to $PHB than she deserves, but his air of
frustration suggests that this has worn out his tolerance for her. She
has not yet hassled me; I think she knows I am not going to pleasantly
comply (she couldn't help but notice how scornful I was of the first
noises towards having a dress code). And yet I know that the lack of
consistency will nag at her and my time will come. This may be the
final insult that pushes me over the edge to bail out of there. Due to
$PHB's stellar project management skills, we have a huge stack of
projects that she believes we will somehow finish all within the next
few months, except they are all, not suprisingly, interfering with each
other. For example, a major software installation involving having to
babysit a venduh conslutant for two weeks happened to be scheduled for
exactly the two weeks leading up to this LDAP flop. Now the LDAP flop
is being pushed back to sit on top of whatever other projects are coming
up. Well, unless we don't get to do an ArgNcc upgrade because Legal and
Purchasing can't finish processing and approving the Invitation-to-Bid
before the deadline set in the paperwork. Oh god my job has totally
turned to suck.

--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
stevev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
.

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