Sam had been watching the engineering team tackle a problem with the JBoss servers for the last couple of hours, Sam had asked a couple of questions and given some pointers but didn’t feel any good would come from jumping in and solving the issue for them but now people were starting to lose patients with the situation. Sam strummed his fingers on the table staring two rows of desks over at the support team look blank-faced at google pages and error messages.
Sam stopped drumming and hunched over the keyboard launching a terminal session to each server and hopping to the configuration directory for the application. A quick list of the contents and Sam noticed something, the timestamps on two of the servers was three months older than the rest of the servers. Sam copied them all onto the local machine and did a quick diff against them, and as expected they were different. Sam stared at the ceiling a moment.
“Give me strength.”
Sam’s boss peered over the monitor, “what’s up?” Sam rubbed his face a moment.
“I’ll be right back.” Sam didn’t feel like humiliating the support team to the Head of Infrastructure just yet. Sam stood up and walked over to the senior engineer.
“Hey, Rick.”
“Alright Sam, bit busy at the moment.”
“Yeah, I know, hey, have they checked the config files like I asked a couple of hours ago?”
Rick glanced over at the application engineers.
“They said they were going to but then James came over and asked them something. So I’m not sure.”
“Yeah so about the config files, the two knackered boxes are running a version from three months ago for some reason.”
“Crap. Really?” Rick asked, looked at Sam’s face and then looked over to the app support team. “I’ll have them check.”
“Yeah, and try and find out how what happened happened. You folks can spin it any way you like.” Sam waited for Rick to nod and then walked back to his desk shaking his head.
“Cock up?” Dave asked as he sat down. Sam rolled his eyes and closed the terminals.