Crunch time
So, I'm working from home this morning, pretty much like everyone else in the systems programming group. This afternoon I'll try to catch a few hours' sleep, unless more issues show up at work. At 11PM, I'll drive to Wellesley, to be at my desk and all prepped before midnight. Then the fun begins. The production system will officially be down from 1:30 until 5:30, but I'm scheduled to be on-site from midnight til 11AM, just in case.
When the system goes down, it'll consist of 2 UNIX and about 60 Windows NT servers. When it comes back up, it'll be about 12 UNIX and 9 Windows machines - hopefully the Windows servers will decrease over time to about 4. Not only that, but the language (Caché) will change by 4 major revs. That's why we've been under a code freeze for all this week. (That doesn't stop programmers from moving changes into Production, but they'd better have a *very* good reason...)
We're so focused on this right now, that when the entire development platform went down with a "Shared Memory" error this morning, many of us (at least me) viewed it as an "annoyance." Our UNIX System Managers are thrashing this out with HP and Intersystems, so we'll ignore it for now. We've still got too much on our list of pre-migration tasks to be bothered...
I've taken care of all my personal list of things-to-do, but I'm double-checking all the configuration files, looking for last-minute programmer requests, and filling in as needed.
As for the application developers... Don't get me started. Most of them are intelligent, hard-working people - after all, I used to be one of them myself. But a few... I expect to get more-than-a-few calls on Monday about "I can't get into Production" where the answer will be, "Why are you trying to get on the old machines? Have you read *any* of our notices over the past 6 months?" I have one programmer who's testing last week generated over 180,000 errors in Q/A (about 4000 per minute). Her solution? Turn off the error logging! Now when the program goes into the endless loop, there won't be any messages, so I guess it isn't a problem, right? (Sorry - a geek moment... there, it's gone now)
Well, time to see how the Development platform's doing...