[conspire] Slice of life

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Fri Sep 18 14:12:49 PDT 2009


Thanks, Carl.  As you say, it turns out that doing change control
requests does small miracles in keeping the production, customer-facing
environment stable.  And yes, DNS can be a particular point of pain,
especially when the master daemon nameserver won't restart because of a
syntax problem hidden somewhere in one of several conffiles / include
files or one of a thousand-plus zonefiles -- but you have to guess
where, because the BIND9 daemon's abysmal built-in checking means it
can't tell you where.

Just to be clear, what I posted was a _request_.  All requests may be
deployed only after passing review by a fellow senior sysadmin and an
Operations manager.

Worst-case scenario is that the responsible party runs the change
procedure on a Friday afternoon, leaves to go fishing, and everything
breaks a short while later.  At that point, the existence of a specific,
scriptable backout procedure means the poor-bastard on-call tech can
revert the change.

-- 
Cheers,            "Orthodoxy is my doxy.  Heterodoxy is someone else's doxy."
Rick Moen               -- William Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester (1698-1779)
rick at linuxmafia.com




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