Fri, 20 Nov 2009

Premature Upgrade

You are a technically-competent geek who has been in the sysadmin world for decades. You have many machines under your care. One of your machines is a fax server that sends hundreds of faxes a day. Your operating system is going through the pre-release stages of getting a new major release out which has many new features and many changed features, as you might expect in a change from release 7.2 to 8.0. A release candidate for 8.0 is announced, so you grab it.

So far, all is good. But then you blindly upgrade your one fax server to the release candidate and discover that the completely new (and not at all secret) serial I/O system doesn’t work quite right with your hylafax setup. You already know, from at least 10 years of experience with it, that hylafax is demanding and that issues with the serial hardware or software result in bad things happening.

This is where you are supposed to say, “Oops, silly me. I should have learned not to do that by now. Quick, let’s unwind that to a known working setup real fast before this turns into a disaster.”

But no, this person decides to conduct pointless experiments instead of unwinding his mistake. And he also finds spare time to complain to the providers of the free operating system he has relied on for so long.

This just doesn’t make any sense to me. I’d love to think that people could learn from their own mistakes and even from other people’s mistakes—but sometimes that seems like a foolish dream.

And yes, I deliberately avoided mentioning names or providing URLs. I’m not interested in having a go at any individual, just using a real current case as a cautionary tale.

Posted at: 14:36

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