So I pose you the question, is the following new reboot policy good for my job or is it a personal attack against me? Lets start by giving you some background. First, one of the niche products that I know pretty well is blackberry servers. I have been maintaining them with my company for a couple of years now. The other blackberry guy is actually our exchange admin and he tries to keep a hands off appoach on managing the server. Well, blackberry’s rule of thumb is that if you think you have a problem, reboot the server. Period. The end. No discussion. Do not pass go, go directly to reboot. I also have found that the quickest way to resolve the problem is to reboot the server. Restarting the services is a tool and does not generally yield the best results. Therefore, when I have a problem, I reboot the server. The server takes less than a minute to reboot, and it is virtual, so if it had a problem, it is easily fixable.
With that said, before we virtualized it, the server’s hw was failing. We only wanted to reboot the server when nessassary which I was on board with. We also had an exchange server that failed and had all sorts of issues. Once all the problems were resolved with the exchange server, I had rebooted the blackberry server to resolve the many issues I was seeing on it. I feel it was nessasary to resolve a problem before 80 people complained instead of after. The exchange admin emails me back saying to not reboot that server again unless granted permission by himself, the director of IT or the president of the company. I agreed, but still felt the correct decision was to reboot the server.
Now to the present, we had resolved the HW issue, and another problem came up that required a reboot of the server. I had done so, and the director of IT sends me an emails saying you need permission before rebooting any servers. Now, this annoys me to all end. The reason? The policy only towards me. There are 5 other techs that can reboot servers at any given moment, but I need to get approval first. If you wanted to enstate such a policy, it should be across the board and not individually based. Right now, I feel hurt and offended because it just means that they do not trust my judgement to reboot non-critical production servers. I cannot wait for this one server to fail where the only resolution is reboot. This has been the standard for several years now and will relish waiting to get permission to do so….
And these are the reasons why I had left this job the first time around….
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