Over the weekend, while burning the candle at both ends and generally walking around like a zombie, I had a moment of clarity of vision, not an insight, clarity, as in, I could see clearly how to explain a, b & c just by saying this that and the other in that order.
Sadly, or beneficially, for mankind, it’s all bloody vanished into thin air, I have no fucking idea what it was now, I can remember the feeling of clarity, and thinking I must blog dis’ shit, but I cannot think what the fuck I was thinking about.
Ho hum, can’t have been that important anyway, or maybe it was, and that’s why Agent Smith erased it from my consciousness…
I guess life is full of little inconsequential shit like that, I also witnessed, just witnessed mind ewe, I wasn’t a participant in any way, the after effects of someone doing a firmware update on a pretty large and powerful companies’ core switches, and bricking them in the process…. that’s all I know for a fact, they were doing a firmware update, and now the switches are bricked, so the company network is hard down.
…well, the other fact I know for a fact is that it was fuck all to do with me, I just saw it, and frankly that was too close for my liking, it was interesting being on the outside watching those on the inside as the seconds and minutes ticked away towards open of business on Monday (today) and various buck passing phone calls were made, but fuck all was done about actually fixing the problem.
Nobody wanted to bite that bullet, my advice would have been to grab whoever it was in the company with the authority to write large cheques, pick up the phone to San Jose and tell them you want a technician or two and a stack of four switches on the next plane to the UK, then, AFTER you open for business normally on Monday, hold a post mortem and see what the fuck went wrong with your present IT solutions.
But then, me being me, I’d have had duplicate switches sent to site, cloned the firmware and config from the existing ones, and THEN attempted the firmware upgrade on the existing ones, worst case scenario is you have wasted the expense of shipping duplicate switches to site and racking them up just in case, it would have been an expense for sure, but it wouldn’t have been a disruption.
My skills are woefully inadequate to repair the failure they suffered, as in I don’t know 1% of what I need to to walk in there and do a bare metal reinstall and a bare metal config recreation AND feel 100% confident that shit was gonna work, so maybe a case of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, or maybe a case of those with the least competence being the most likely to over-estimate their own levels of competence, or maybe just fuck it, she’ll be right… oh fuck….now what do we do…
I’m reminded of a guy I knew / met years ago, he used to do wiring on submarines, and his attitude to data cabling in a comms rack was simple, you find some guy off the street, you give him 50 buck to go into the comms room, unplug every patch cable he can see, and just throw them all in a pile in the corner… if you cannot then walk into that room, and reinsert every single cable correctly, not just the right connection, but the right way around, then you did not have your cables correctly labelled, or your network map correctly updated.
Back then when I heard him say it, I thought “what a cunt“, nowadays, I wish I could bump into him again, I’d buy the man a beer or three.
See, that’s the other thing he used to say, if they can’t do simple shit like that and get that shit done right, then don’t trust *anything* else they do on site… and again, as the years have passed, the more right I realise he was… the site I mention above, fucking rats nest, no way they could even
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I wrote the above 11 days ago, saved the draft, and haven’t had the time to get back to it since.
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I want to give praise for my relative health. I’ve got a friend who isn’t so fortunate, the funny thing is, in shades of the first paragraph of this delayed post, I can’t tell the difference between someone who isn’t with me because they are fucked, and someone who isn’t with me because they can’t *be* fucked, at my stage in life, they both pretty much feel the same, how about them apples.
I see DMJ’s latest piece, and the thought that slides into my head is DMJ has found something he gives a fuck about, and that’s bad, because things you give a fuck about are chinks in the armour, and that got me thinking about all the chinks in my armour, and that ain’t too sharp either, on my part…
I’m on my last but one cigarette, time to quit again, got that cough that ain’t going away, long after the cold that started it has left and gone, so no doubt I’ll be snappy with nicotine withdrawal for a few weeks, fuck it, it’s better than losing that relative health I mentioned above.
That’s about it for tonight, got some vacation comin, so catch ya’ll on the flipside.