Craziest deadline I've ever had...

Task: Patch 193 machines
Environment:
- no configuration/patch management
- no knowledge of the machines
- no contact info/application owners

...timeframe...do it today!

Here's the winner...do we have credentials for these machines? Ha, nope.

So what did you do?

@drRoss ...what I did, as follows:

- Discovery
-- Identified OS type/versions, purpose of the device (applications/services/dependencies)
-- Gathered credentials
-- Gathered contact info for application owners

- Scripting and Fabric
-- wrote scripts per OS/requirements
-- scheduled downtime and submitted CM
-- pushed out with a Fabric fabfile which pointed to a list of hosts per script/OS type, in batches.
-- looked for errors and verified with application owners everything went well
-- fixed anything that remained down without manual intervention

- Recommended doing this the right way in the future and setting up infrastructure to support these kinds of exercises.

It's just ridiculous how people don't do things the right way and instead want work done in a time consuming yet urgent manner which is instantly out of sync with the real world...sad, really.

@FractalSystems wow, I'm amazed of your work! Did you use nmap for scanning and getting credentials?

@OrestH nmap was one of many tools used, absolutely. Not to mention all the emails to/from random people trying to get info on each...It was a nightmare.

@FractalSystems are you sys admin?

@OrestH I am. By title I was a sys admin, systems engineer is current title.