Being Prepared and Thinking Ahead
Being compared to a Boy Scout is not what most hot-shot sysadmins
want. However, unless you are one of the few that can rebuild
filesystems from a list of inodes and block addresses, or can re-wire
a network with a swiss army knife and chocolate bars, you will want
to be prepared before any major undertaking. It you still want to be
manly about it, you can consider it a plan of attack.
It's a simple concept. Before doing any major task, think about
what could, and most likely will, go wrong and come up with contingency
plans. For example, if you are going to be upgrading the operating
system on a major file server you may want to be able to back out in
case something goes wrong. Things that may go wrong could include...
- New OS does not support installed hardware
- Upgrade deletes exported filesystems
- Upgrading OS required upgrading firmware which turned your
spiffy fileserver into a door stop.
Solutions could include...
- Thorough inspection of hardware against what the OS supports
- Multiple, verified backups of filesystems
- Auxiliary boot devices (CDROM, hard drives, floppies, network, ...)
- Spare firmware chips or thorough inspection of supported firmware
Whatever your solutions may be, they should be fully thought out and
documented before beginning the procedure. They should also be discussed
with or described to all parties involved. You want everyone thinking
about the same recovery plans incase of a failure, otherwise when a failure
does occur you may have one person trying a restore from tape, while another
reinstalls from CD.
Today's Date:
Last Modified:
URL:
K. Scott Rowe