NT Horror Stories

[Jonathan Hutchins]

In fairness regarding the Novel thread, NT is guilty of some incredible
horrors.  (We will discreetly draw the morgue sheet over stories of Small
Business Server.)

Would you believe that TimeWarner's local RoadRunner cable modem service was
using NT and Exchange for it's mail service?  They had an NT cluster set up
to handle it.

One night they decided to upgrade the cluster.  No  report of what was being
upgraded, but by about six AM, they realized they were locked in one of
those NT install bogs where it runs for hours instead of twenty minutes, and
doesn't work.

Unfortunately, they hadn't segmented the cluster, and they apparently didn't
have reliable backups.  They were stuck with the cluster half-way upgraded
and unable to boot.  Great panic ensued, to the point of actually having
Microsoft engineers fly out from Redmond to try to get it back up.

A week later it was still down.

I don't know what they did to eventually fix it.  You or I would have had
new machines on line in a day or two if that's what it took, but they kept
fighting it.  Somebody with some sense hopefully insisted that a real mail
system be set up instead of Mickeysoft.

Now clearly this is a procedural problem as much as it is bad software.
They shouldn't have done the cluster live, they should have segmented it,
upgraded an off-line segment, tested it, and then cut over and upgraded the
rest.  And what moron decided they didn't need a solid, verified image
backup before they did a major system update?

Probably a nephew of the moron who decided NT was a good mail handler for an
ISP.