Adding Structure To My Life
Monday: We need to change all local administrator accounts company wide. This, of course, falls to me. I’m not a programmer, but I know enough to get by. Upon investigation I find that there’s a total of 1253 servers that need the local admin password changed. I’m beginning to dread this week already.
Tuesday: Begin writing a program that will crawl the network and change the password.
Wednesday: Testing is successful. I think this project is in the bag…uh, my manager now wants the developer account password changed, and now I’ll need to reset the password expiration countdown to zero, and expire in 90 days. Coding resumes.
….and a hard drive goes south in a blade….and the sharepoint server has run out of HD space…and a VP is asking for a server to be built in VM….argh!
Thursday: Yay for me! I’ve managed to lock out the admin account on nearly 100 machines while testing my program. Code in a quick fix. …heck with this, I’m going to the gym.
Friday: Manager says, “Oh, by the way, we’ll need to change the rmadmin account at the same time we change the administrator account, and we need this done asap. And can you unrack the Whale rack and send the equipment to S&H?”. Unrack the equipment and then continue coding. I’m worn out, feeling like Wilford Brimley on Valium.
Manager then says to me, “Can you come in on Saturday? We need the passwords changed before Monday. This is project critical.” I begin wishing I packed a flask on my person.
Saturday (6am): Program successfully crawls the network, making changes to the administrator, developer, and rmadmin accounts, setting the countdowns to the required dates. For a variety of reasons, only 102 servers fail to change. Complete these failures by hand. As I’m about to walk out the door another blade server begins to have issues with hardware. I take the easy way out of this and convert the server to a VM and finally walk out the door exhausted, vowing not to pick up the phone on Sunday.
What can I say…I live for this shit.
