It is that time again, time for me to update our install of Adobe Reader, and push it out. (Yes, I know, Adobe Reader) We use Administrative Install Points (AIPs) and AD GPOs to install it across the domain. while this works nicely, there is some pain involved in getting the AIP set up correctly.
Pain Aspect #1: Patch Order. I refer you to the Adobe KB When doing AIPs, you can't go 9.4 -> 9.4.1 -> 9.4.2 -> 9.4.3 -> 9.4.4, you have to start at 9.4, and jump to 9.4.2
Pain Aspect #2: Customization. Adobe has released a customization toolkit specifically for those of us that do global installs. but it breaks things, If you have any customization, you have to revert to a vanilla AIP, then upgrade, and then re-apply the customizations
Pain Aspect #3: Regression. This is something that Adobe is well-known for. As an administrator, I have to test, double-test, and then re-test for regression issues. There are known issues with folder redirection that cause perennial heartache. (this is one reason why we aren't moving to Reader X yet)
Long story short, it took me about 3 hours to get the latest installer ready to push out by GPO. I didn't find any issues with the new version, but I'm sure I'll get a call tomorrow from one of the users.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Email, the life-blood of an institution
We're just coming back from a somewhat major email outage here. Long story short, a component on the motherboard of our mail server failed, and this brought the mail server down for just over 41 hours, as with any sort of incident, a postmortem exam is in order.
Our response could have been better. I lost count of the number of times I answered the phone saying "Yes email is down, alright, have a nice day." Getting word out to people when a primary channel of communication is down is very difficult. In the end we ended up using voice mail to get the word out, but this was highly sub-optimal.
For those of us not directly involved in getting the server back up and running, life was expected to continue. The lack of email made things very difficult. We are currently at the point in the year when are contacting vendors, getting quotes lines up so that come the start of the new fiscal year, we can pull the trigger without any hesitation. It's kind of difficult to get quotes when you can't get email. (Interestingly enough, there are some places that will only send out quotes electronically via email, but require you to fax a purchase order in, go figure)
Now, given that we use Exchange, it wasn't just email that was down. Calendars were inaccessible unless they happened to have been cached before the crash, likewise with people's contacts. It is kind of scarey how many people rely on a single technology to store practically their whole life.
There were some bright spots to the whole affair though, I can remember a time when the default assumption was "the network is down" rather than "something must be wrong with my computer" this time I'd say I answered roughly equal numbers of "Is the network down?" and "what is wrong with my computer" questions.
All in all, I still think our disaster plan needs some work, but we got through it.
Our response could have been better. I lost count of the number of times I answered the phone saying "Yes email is down, alright, have a nice day." Getting word out to people when a primary channel of communication is down is very difficult. In the end we ended up using voice mail to get the word out, but this was highly sub-optimal.
For those of us not directly involved in getting the server back up and running, life was expected to continue. The lack of email made things very difficult. We are currently at the point in the year when are contacting vendors, getting quotes lines up so that come the start of the new fiscal year, we can pull the trigger without any hesitation. It's kind of difficult to get quotes when you can't get email. (Interestingly enough, there are some places that will only send out quotes electronically via email, but require you to fax a purchase order in, go figure)
Now, given that we use Exchange, it wasn't just email that was down. Calendars were inaccessible unless they happened to have been cached before the crash, likewise with people's contacts. It is kind of scarey how many people rely on a single technology to store practically their whole life.
There were some bright spots to the whole affair though, I can remember a time when the default assumption was "the network is down" rather than "something must be wrong with my computer" this time I'd say I answered roughly equal numbers of "Is the network down?" and "what is wrong with my computer" questions.
All in all, I still think our disaster plan needs some work, but we got through it.
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