The last week of work
Not for good of course, just for the year. The last couple of weeks of the year are always something of a dead time here in U.S. government-land. In fact, so many people are out on vacation that the government actually mandates a freeze on all activity related to production servers. We do important work (weather forecasting related) and what we do helps save lives all over the world. So the last thing we want is for someone to make a change to a server that causes production to fail when the three people who know how the system works are on vacation and scattered across the continent.
It’s a good policy, one a heartily agree with. We have another one about not making changes on Friday’s for the same reason, although since there are 52 of them in a year, that policy tends to get waved a lot, which leads to disasters, which reminds us why we have the policy in the first place.
Now, the freeze doesn’t officially affect me. My group runs one system that is classified as a “Prototype, Experimental, Proof of Concept System”. You can’t get much more weaselly than that, and it pretty much frees us of the burden of the freeze. And yet our “experimental system” feeds data to a dozen other organizations that use it for their own critically important systems. And they scream like banshees when our system goes down. So, even though we’re still classed as development, we’re treated as production and the freeze “effectively” applies to us. We have a second system which we’re in the middle of porting everything over to, but we’re at a standstill at the moment pending governmental decisions. Did I mention they’re all on vacation? So we’re waiting until next year for continue on that front.
So, what does this mean? It means I have lots of time to respond to e-mail and write extra blog entries instead of doing the work I’m being paid for. And every day that takes us closer to Christmas reduces the number of people in the building, and therefore the few remaining bits of work that are left to me. My one shining ray of light is that one of our redundant servers just had its file system corrupted. Yes, that’s the good news. Because that means I’m going to be busy for at least a day rebuilding the file system, reloading the applications, and reinitializing the accounts. The bad news is that I need to have the system security people scan it before it can be put back on line. Oh, did I mention … they’re all on vacation.