On Name Because the previous saying goes, there are few certainties in life past loss of life and taxes. However on this week’s On-Name – The Register’s common reader-contributed tales of techies being requested to rescue the ridiculous – we will contemplate one other: new managers who needlessly change programs that work completely properly.
The supply of this story is a reader named “Scanlon” who as soon as labored for a corporation that employed a brand new operations director. Not lengthy after taking the gig, the brand new man declared his intention to “audit every thing you guys are doing incorrect.”
Which moderately rubbed Scanlon up the incorrect means as a result of, as he advised On-Name, “I do not pander to somebody who has extra ambition than technical nous.”
Ouch.
Scanlon could not cease the brand new ops director operating his eye over the corporate’s tech, which on the time was largely midrange programs because it moved away from mainframes.
When Scanlon arrived on the firm, he discovered a number of IBM P570 programs in place. Curiously, they had been being utilized in bare-metal mode moderately than operating digital machines.
“The end result was costly tin that wasn’t performing anyplace close to capability and there have been plans to purchase much more equipment,” Scanlon scoffed.
Our hero was sorting that out as the brand new ops director arrived. He had one remaining concern to deal with: a difficult SAN driver improve to get a third-party vendor’s storage equipment enjoying good with the IBM servers.
As a result of the improve was not full, it was included within the audit.
I did not obtain a phrase of thanks and I used to be by no means compensated for my misplaced holidays
“I had an preliminary assembly with the brand new chap the place he launched me to an exterior advisor that he had engaged to audit our programs,” Scanlon recalled. “I ran by means of the configs and identified that we had been nonetheless coping with a vendor to resolve the motive force updates and that in consequence there was a patch that we had been holding off making use of.”
Scanlon reckoned different work may wait till the SAN was sorted, identified he was taking vacation the next week, and requested if the audit may wait till he returned. He left the room feeling his plan had been accepted, so headed off for his break.
On the primary Tuesday of his vacation, a colleague tracked him down with information: the advisor had been given root passwords, commenced the audit in Scanlon’s absence, and had run some scripts to start his probe.
These scripts took some time to run, which the advisor defined, naturally, on his means out the door for the day.
Not lengthy afterwards employees seen an eruption of alerts, adopted by shoppers complaining they might not course of transactions.
Which was why colleagues referred to as Scanlon, who tried to triage the state of affairs from afar.
Earlier than lengthy, the brand new ops director demanded he come to the workplace.
Fortunately, Scanlon was solely 5 hours away by street and was respectable sufficient to reply the decision.
When he arrived, within the wee hours of Wednesday, he seen all of the servers had surrendered to a kernel panic.
A look at log recordsdata rapidly confirmed the script run by the auditor was the reason for the crash.
The script was buggy, however when the primary server turned unresponsive the advisor dismissed it as a mere pause whereas the script did its job.
So he ran it on extra machines. Which additionally crashed.
Scanlon’s evaluation of the state of affairs was that the script disconnected all of the digital servers from the community and storage, so the servers promptly hung.
As soon as he restored issues to working situation, the SAN and community paths got here again on-line, databases recovered, and enterprise resumed.
Scanlon obtained again in his automobile and drove one other 5 hours to renew leisure along with his household.
Is he nonetheless somewhat bitter concerning the incident? Perhaps only a smidge.
“I did not obtain a phrase of thanks from the corporate, and I used to be by no means compensated for my misplaced holidays,” he wrote.
“The one saving grace is that I remained with the corporate for a number of years after that, whereas the tenure of the ops director was considerably shorter.”
“And my response to the corporate was quiet quitting for the following 12 years” – displaying as much as work with out giving it his greatest effort.
Have new managers and their minions impacted your work, and seen you referred to as out to handle their messes? Click on right here to e-mail On-Name along with your story, which it might be our privilege to contemplate for a point out on this house on a future Friday. ®
