CherryPopper

I just got certified for Solaris 9 and the very next job I get is to do an upgrade from Solaris 8 to 10. So its off to the deep end again for me to see if I sink or swim. After doing some googling and a practice run on a server in the office I think I know enough to "wing it". I jump on a plane & head on over to the exciting city that is Adelaide. Just my luck too, all the other guys get sent to Sydney, Brisbane even Fiji and my first trip is to Adelaide!!!

Follow up:

I get to Adelaide, catch a cab to the client and get to work, well at least attempt to as they haven't set me up a PC as yet. So its a run around the office looking for a spare PC for me as their security policy is not to let any one but their PC's plug into the network. They find me a pc and I start the upgrade. After a few miss steps I'm watching progress bars so I sit back and listen to my ipod. At around 60% through I see it popup with a panic error (think BSOD for Unix) and its saying it can't see the DVD drive anymore. WTF I sit there for a sec scratching my head then check the server. The dvd drives are removable and have little clips holding them in, they weren't clipped in so after 20 mins of CD spinning had wobbled loose. Just great.

The upgrade is no totally fucked and I have to restore from backup (it was a mirrored disk so I just resync'ed). That was Thursday done, I had wasted a day and got back to where I was in the morning. So I was a little pissed.

Checked into my hotel then went for a walk into the so called "Festival City" only to find it all closed at 7pm. But I did find a decent restaurant at the Hilton hotel and racked up an $80 feed for 1. After making a pig of myself and sampling a few local wines I decide to call it a night and started walking to the hotel... or so I thought. I ended up in the opposite direction to where I thought I was and ended up just catching a cab, man I was way off.

My second attempt at the upgrade was a lot more successful and after finding some very big system flaws in the way it had been setup (redundant disk setup wasn't so redundant) we were up and running on Solaris 10. The SAP & Oracle fired up ok and the testing went well. So it was back home to celebrate St Pat's day in Geelong.

Had a strange cabby on the way home though... we got to little river and he asks me if he could stop for a few minutes? I ask what for expecting an answer along the lines of "petrol, take a dump, etc" but instead hear "I need to prey"? I stair at him with my best WTF look and he explains that he is a Muslim and needs to prey 5 times a day & this is one of the times. I say fine as I can't be bothered listening to him make a big deal out of it so he pulls over on the highway, stops the meter, pop's the boot & gets his little rug then runs into the bushes to prey. After a few minutes we are on our way again.

I finally get home after a pretty full on 2 days where way to many odd things happened to me. But I pulled off a tin ass install within the quoted time and the customer is happy (which means my boss will love me). Now I have to go back 2 more times and do it again on other servers.... I just hope I don't get the same cabby