Could you image a world where everything you touch and try just works and all is well? No? Me neither.. Especially in terms of IT systems. There is always something to do. Wether it be creating or updating software, deploying systems, hardware modifications to tackle new challenges or just user suppport for the latest edge cases. I bet there is a lot more that would need coverage but I dont have the time to finish this list. I guess what I want to say is:

I updated the server. Which one? The one you requested this page from. But not only the server got an update, all used software aroud it got updates too. This means we run on the latest and greatest operating system kernel and patches, the blog software got an update under the hood (more on this in a seperate post), the domain management got fixed and updated, the mailserver that I have running got updated and configured properly…. and I bet that I forgot something reallz important to list here. But if you ever have done something similar you know that this stuff takes time. Mostly time that nobody has or is willing to take.

“It works, just dont touch it and it wont break” or more commonly known as “Never touch a running system” A sentence that I learned to hate with passion. The idea behind it seems neat: get everything up and running, configure it to your liking, and forget about it because software that runs properly once, will (or rather should) behave the same way everytime.

But sadly this is not true. And if you work with in the industry long enough you will face issues from parts of the system that where considered “robust” and “fail safe” .. at least at the time they were deployed.

So keep in mind folks: Test your systems regularly, update them on at least a fixed schedule and dont forget to always have your backups ready (I should write about backups sometime, shouldnt I?).

So far, just a quick entry to make sure everybody knows that I’m still here. Working on my projects (check my other posts) and I might try to post more in here in the future… we will see how this goes.