Thursday, June 09, 2005

Best Practice

Well, work has calmed down somewhat, although I am still damping down problems caused by that dodgy Microsoft Hotfix from last week! It turns out that when they say problems may occur on ‘some servers’ they really mean it will affect at least half of Liam’s servers. I was working late last night, futilely as it turned out, and again tonight I have a machine to reboot after the backup finishes.

Major problems inevitably result in reviews of how the issue came about in the first place and a search for methods to stop a similar problem occurring in future, but in this case we are a bit stymied. Because the problem is so apparently random, I cannot see a way we could have detected it in advance, apart from having a chip-for-chip, program-for-program duplicate of our live network available for testing on. In theory doing just that is ‘Best Practice,’ but I doubt you will find any company anywhere that has the resources to totally duplicate their back-end systems just for testing purposes.

I guess I’ll just keep banging my head against a wall…

Apart from that, nothing much is happening in my life. I had lunch with Rosie on Tuesday and Oz on Wednesday, both of which were pleasant. I’m slipping into a bit of bachelor mode at home though: Dirty dishes are accumulating. Maybe it’s because I’m working late. Yeah, right!

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