… but it helps if you want to work here.

SSL certificates expires. On a server where ONUs work. You can imagine their confusion. All those annoying „certificate has expired, do you still trust the source jadajdadajdada”. Application-Team notices it, writes a trouble ticket for Operations and puts everything in motion to renew the certificate ASAP.

Almost a week later, humble Application-Developer wants to know, what the status regarding the certificate is and sends polite e-mail. What follows is the following dialog on the phone:

Operations: Why are you bothering us with this e-mail. We never had anything to do with certificates. We don’t know nothing about that. Don’t bother us with that!
Me: One of your colleagues accepted to Trouble Ticket. So at least someone knows about it.
Operations: We never had anything to do with certificates. We don’t know nothing about that. Don’t bother us with that!
Me: Ok, let’s take a step back. There is a certificate issue. Do you think this is in the responsibility of development operations?
Operations: Well, yes, but …
Me: And there is a Trouble Ticket for it. So when will you do something about it?
Operations: We never had anything to do with certificates. We know nothing, we don’t know what to do, whom to ask, jadajadajada.
Me: There are detailed instructions in the Trouble Ticket. Have you read it?
Operations: No, but we never had anything to do with certificates. We know nothing, we don’t know what to do, whom to ask, jadajadajada.
Me: There are detailed instructions in the Trouble Ticket. Please read it!
Operations: OK, we will call you back.

Two days later, I haven’t heard from them. So I fire off another mail, requesting an status-update on the issue. The answer was „yes, we talked with the responsible person. He is waiting for the root certificate. A colleague is working on that”. Now, that wasn’t too difficult, wasn’t it? Mind you, they didn’t tell me a date so I asked again for a estimated time of solution. Only then I got an answer from the colleague that the root certificate is on the way to the certificate issuer and that the problem will be solved within on or two days. And guess what – the problem still persists after two days.

And that is not the only sign of incompetence in that team. I support an application that relies heavily on Notes’ full text index. On the two machines, where this application will be deployed to, it takes over an hour fora new document to enter the full text index. As this is not acceptable, I sent them an e-mail. Nothing happened. I talked to one of the guys, sent him the e-mail again. Nothing. So I opened up a Trouble Ticket. The reaction: Nothing.

I had to sent several more e-mails, cc-ing the bosses to get a response. The response was: „We will tell you in a week, when we will look at the problem”. I am still waiting.

A colleague calls me. They have problems with one of their Notes-Applications. They are handling large documents (attachments) and are running out of space on the server. There is an Agent to delete old documents, but it only ran once. If I could take a look, why it didn’t run.

Checking the Agent Log, it tells me, the agent run once. Hmmm. Strange. OK, let’s take a look into the Notes-Log on the server. Even stranger. There are no entries for the time, when the agent is scheduled to run. ROTFL. Every night the server is shut down 2 hours before the agent is scheduled to run and only gets restarted 4 hours later. How dumb can a team of administrators be.

Oh, and they don’t have the time to take a look themselves, because they have to migrate from Notes/Domino 5 to Release 6. The customer said, that this is of the highest priority. Never mind, that they already migrated 2005. I wonder what they did last year??? And never mind, that there are at least 4 persons doing that. And they can’t do anything else then migrate the servers? No, that’s not true, as they are trying to make an appointment to test some obscure feature that we need sometime next year. But we will not test that until the other problems are resolved.

It’s incompetent Admins like these that cause the bad word of mouth for Notes. It’s not the product, it’s the badly selected people and bad processes!

Tagged as: Ein_Tag_im_Leben, it, rant, work-mentality | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Freitag, 20060707, 11:00 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)