Will... not... punch... screen...
In cooperation with another college, we're setting up an automated Windows patching system called PatchLink. We've been working on this for several months now, the last two of which have been spent in a constant state of being within 1 week of rolling it out, only to have something rear its ugly head.
First there was the fact that the server was unstable. Turned out that it was a known bug with the version of the software we were running, but we didn't have access to the fixed version because the licensing partner that sold us the license (Novell) hadn't OKed the particular version that doesn't crash.
Then there was the fact that we got bad information from Novell about where to get the updated version, so we had a perfectly functional version that wasn't Novell branded, so Novell couldn't promise us that we'd continue to recieve patch updates. To quote our Novell contact, "Huh. I don't understand why it's still working. Rest assured, it won't for long."
Then the only Novell guy who knows PatchLink and whom we are allowed to call without a credit card went on vacation for a week, leaving us without access to either the software or technical support.
Now we've got the right variant of the software, installed in a stable configuration. But user access rights in this particular version don't work the way they did in the one where we'd done all of our planning, so all of our departmental technical support people can neither add nor remove computers from the system (although they can still work with them once a PatchLink administrator has set up each machine). Fixes to similar situations in the PatchLink KnowledgeBase consist almost entirely of giving everyone involved full Administrator access to not only PatchLink, but the underlying Windows 2003 server. Grr...
First there was the fact that the server was unstable. Turned out that it was a known bug with the version of the software we were running, but we didn't have access to the fixed version because the licensing partner that sold us the license (Novell) hadn't OKed the particular version that doesn't crash.
Then there was the fact that we got bad information from Novell about where to get the updated version, so we had a perfectly functional version that wasn't Novell branded, so Novell couldn't promise us that we'd continue to recieve patch updates. To quote our Novell contact, "Huh. I don't understand why it's still working. Rest assured, it won't for long."
Then the only Novell guy who knows PatchLink and whom we are allowed to call without a credit card went on vacation for a week, leaving us without access to either the software or technical support.
Now we've got the right variant of the software, installed in a stable configuration. But user access rights in this particular version don't work the way they did in the one where we'd done all of our planning, so all of our departmental technical support people can neither add nor remove computers from the system (although they can still work with them once a PatchLink administrator has set up each machine). Fixes to similar situations in the PatchLink KnowledgeBase consist almost entirely of giving everyone involved full Administrator access to not only PatchLink, but the underlying Windows 2003 server. Grr...