When a Simple Server Upgrade Becomes a Weekend Project
A supposedly straightforward infrastructure upgrade turns into the familiar combination of planning, troubleshooting, unexpected problems and learning something along the way.
There is a particular kind of optimism that comes with starting a technology project.
You have a plan. You've checked the documentation. You've worked out roughly how long everything should take.
Then you actually start.
What was supposed to be a straightforward server upgrade quickly became one of those projects where solving one problem revealed another waiting underneath it.
The plan
On paper, the job was simple: upgrade the storage, move the data, check the services and put everything back into production.
Nothing particularly dramatic.
The important phrase there is “on paper.”
Once real hardware, networking, storage and applications become involved, the neat diagram you started with has a habit of becoming considerably more interesting.
When the troubleshooting starts
This is the part of technology projects I actually enjoy.
Something doesn't behave the way you expected, so you start working backwards. Check the logs. Check the network. Check the configuration. Test an assumption you were absolutely certain couldn't possibly be the problem.
Discover it was the problem.
Fix it.
Then find the next one.
It's frustrating while you're in the middle of it, but it's also where most of the learning happens.
Eventually, production
The satisfying part isn't simply seeing everything working again.
It's knowing a little more about the system than you did when you started.
The next project will undoubtedly produce a completely different collection of unexpected problems, but that's part of the fun.
Nothing stays in the lab forever.
Eventually, it has to survive production.
