Thank You Sarbanes Oxley..........NOT!

I was here at work until midnight last night working on the phone with an IGS (IBM Global Services) person, watching them upgrade an app for us.

Remember the good ol' days when you could just schedule a production upgrade with your users, and then make it happen? Now we are caught up in SO much red tape that it isn't even funny. You have to get a gazillion sign-offs and the Pope's blessing before you can migrate anything to production. AND THEN you aren't allowed to migrate it yourself. OH NO.........that would be too risky. Even though this is a dedicated server and it's the ONLY app running on it! In fact, I don't have JACK SQUAT for rights or privlidges to the production box. So we have to schedule a time with one of the IGS guys to perform the upgrade. So I connect to his shared desktop, then watch as he uses terminal services, connects to the server, and then proceeds to double click on setup.exe and then click 'Next' a few times. Whew! What rocket science this is.......

The reason we were here so late is because the process was goofed up somehow the first time around this was supposed to happen at 8:00. Apparently somewhere in the update process, the server is required to reboot. That freaked him out. Even in their own little IGS side of the world, even they aren't supposed to reboot a production server without going through lots of channels and red tape. So the install got hosed up when he apparently tried to circumvent parts of the process. So I drove back down to work around 9:30 to get involved and help things along. Anyway, after pulling some teeth we were able to get everything smoothed out.

I'm very sleepy today.....................
Published 21 April 2005 08:02 AM by eking1013

Comments

# Alex Papadimoulis said on 21 April, 2005 09:29 AM
No rights to the *Production* box? Pssh, that's nothin!

You should come work here, us *developers* are restricted from anything but read access to the *development* server. That makes changing config files really fun (since they are not deployed to the dev server with our source code).
# AndrewSeven said on 21 April, 2005 06:36 PM
Its odd, I've been pushing in the other direction.

If I'm not in control of the production server, please don't make me responsible for it and don't give me access.

I've automated the build, when they want a new build in QA, they grab the a build and have it deployed to QA. If it passes, they deploy to production.
I do not control or deploy to QA or prod.

Yikes! ->"he apparently tried to circumvent parts of the process". I'm guessing that does not mean he simply cancelled the installer.
It sounds like there is a hole in the process; he should have known and been prepared for the reboot or rolled back when he encountered an unexpected situation.


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