Note to self: Before rebooting a machine remotely, triple check environment! A comedy of errors …
For the past two weeks the days typically started at 4/5AM and finished abruptly when heads dropped on the keyboards, inadvertently clicking the sleep or shutdown button :) The reason for the firestorm is that we have major milestones diverging … which should be evident in the forthcoming monthly highlight post for January.
What I have done, however, are a number of “notes to self” to avoid future frustration …
- When accessing a remote machine (A), hosting a number of virtual environments (B,C,D) from a laptop (E) using remote desktop, which is typically separated by a wall (fire wall, physical access, security and/or locality) you need to be very, very careful when doing the following:
- Joining a/another domain … when joining a machine to a domain, you could loose or receive domain policies. In my case the firewall policy to allow remote desktop access was disabled … door closed. A 55min bus ride to server (A), 3min tweak and 55min bus ride back to laptop (E) resolved the anomaly, but wasted two valuable hours :(
- Changing or removing virtual networks … draw the network on a whiteboard and analyse potential impact^3 of changing any of the networks. In my sad case, I changed virtual network (2) … door closed on B, C and D … relaxing (frustrating) bus ride and 3min tweak followed.
- Triple check all scripts, before running them, especially at 3AM. I literally lost 6 VMs when I inadvertently executed, instead of edited, a PowerShell script that quite effectively deleted all virtual machines. Fortunately I had a backup of all VMs, but restoring 6 VMs on a desktop can take considerable time.
Make a point of watching https://www.ted.com/talks/arianna_huffington_how_to_succeed_get_more_sleep.html … Arianna Huffington makes a good point that sleep is very important! https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_pasricha_the_3_a_s_of_awesome.html is another gem, which highlights that life is awesome :)