Who, me? Welcome once again, dear readers, to the shrine of Who, Me? where Register readers can recount the times when their technical skills deserted them, even if temporarily, without fear of judgment.
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This week we meet a reader who we will regomize as "Monty" who many years ago was employed by a manufacturer of sensors and measurement systems. The small but close-knit software team was responsible for designing, developing, testing, installing and supporting all products from the biz – a challenging and interesting environment, sure, and sometimes confusing too.
Late on a Friday, a customer's system needs to be patched. This particular installation was a remote system consisting of several nodes located abroad, which continuously streamed data to the customer's central office. As you can imagine, downtime outside of the advertised maintenance windows has never been well received, as a matter of principle.
The default solution for installing the software had recently moved from "copy the archive and build locally" to .deb packaging – allowing for proper versioning, dependency management and uninstallation capabilities. Everything was finally automated and fail-safe – or it should have been.
