e For eject

One of the idea to start this blog was to have my own space of rant n' rave. Just to make things clear - none of the things I say on here represent the views of any particular company who stands my 'ex or current employer!!. But sometimes, there are things that come along that really make me smile and of-course an opportunity to make an effort to work on those as part of process improvement.

Once we suffered a mismanaged tagging# blues of our servers in one of the data center. Reboot request sometimes rebooted a wrong server. Now imagine if that server was serving live -that too business critical traffic! Well, preferring NOT to explain the post episode here. Now any guess how do we make it sure that the DC engineer is actually standing in front of the right server, if he had a reboot request to address a server hang or server shifting etc.? :-)

Yes! You are right - 'e' for eject was the savior that time. If he is close by somewhere in the grid or rack one eject should be enough and if it is NOT visible to him - get some scripting in place!

while [ true ]
do
#eject CDROM
eject

#pull CDROM tray back in
eject -t
done

He will definitely locate your server, believe me!

Knock Knock!! Now who says disabling/removing CD-ROM from my server should be a part of DC physical security checklist!!?

Cheers!
DK