When it rains, it freezes

Yucky weather today - freezing rain. It was quite bad for a while. We put out ice melt but it just melted small pellet sized holes in the ice. It was very slippy and one had to walk like a penguin to avoid falling.

Ever notice that when you really need to buckle down and focus on something you seem to get more interruptions that keep you from the important task or tasks? Especially when you're shorthanded! I needed to do some fine-tuning on our network switches at work as we are going through the initial phase of a security certification. I wanted to look at the configurations of the switches to prevent some simple findings. For example, every network device has to have a warning banner at the log-on screen kind of like a "no trespassing" sign. So I wanted to make sure every switch had the appropriate warning banner. Every time I started, something would come up that couldn't be ignored and there wasn't anybody else to handle the issue. A company came by to pick up a storage pod that one of our contractors had used. That was a good hour in the freezing rain. A person called with a computer issue that diverted me for a little bit. Someone else complained about a radio not working properly. A contractor needed help troubleshooting an alarm system that uses our fiber and copper infrastructure. Several other minor interruptions happened as well.

Long story short (too late!), I was finally able to check about seven or eight items per switch stack on nearly 30 switch stacks. I was surprised to find that several switch stacks needed the tweaking. We've had major infrastructure changes over the last year that involved moving/rotating switch stacks. We reconfigured the switches during the moves (updated firmware/software) and somehow overlooked some items. I need to update my cheat sheets for my people on configuring our switches and implement some preventive maintenance/security maintenance checklists.

When it rains, it pours. When it rains when it's really cold, it freezes.