Sysadmin ignores 25 THOUSAND patches, among other sinsh

By: 23 Aug 2015 at 11:05, Simon Sharwood
 
On-call And that's one of the easier chores our reader found himself faced with in a new temp job. Most weekends, our On-Call feature looks at the odd situations readers find themselves in when called to do something on a client site or in the dead of night.
This week we're making an exception for reader “Bill”, who rates himself as “just your average support engineer” with experience on the front lines at companies big and small.
 “I have learned the hard way about things over the years as we all do,” Bill says. But nothing prepared him for a recent gig he describes as “support for some very, very important persons in a small office that accounted for about 40 per cent of the money flowing out of a large multinational”.
The job looked simple: for a month, he'd be supporting Windows Server 2003 and 2008 for 50-60 users with onsite Exchange, Active Directory and BlackBerry Enterprise Server. At the end of the month, a new full-timer would be aboard and Bill could move on to his next contract.
Day one was encouraging. After “all the spiel and introductions companies normally muster for more important people on their first day”, plenty of it in the boardroom, Bill was “handed an A5 piece of paper with the layout of the servers on site and some IPs and hostnames”.
 
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