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I love autoupdate mechanisms. Truly, I do. They're wonderful, as long as they work. They take the load off of me, which means I can scale further. However, this isn't a huggy squeezy mailing list, so let's begin with the hatefulness. It's a proprietary software suite, so I have only one place to go. Great, one place to go for help. Or, so you'd think. That's offset by the fact that they appear to have the shoddiest monitoring system ever devised. I can understand having a few hours downtime during the weekend, because not everyone wants to be on call 24/7 and not have a life of their own. However, when the problems start friday evening/saturday morning, and they aren't fixed when I get to work on monday, things starts to suck. This would be understandable once in a while, because everything can go wrong in all the wrong places at the most inopportune times, but when this has happened 3 weekends in a row, and once or twice during the week as well, that's when my hate starts growing beyond control. So, they've got 2 FTP servers from which the updates are downloaded. Great. Redundancy, right? No, not quite. They use a DNS round robin, so if one of them goes down, we'd go for the other one, right? Oh, but wait, once the built-in dns cilent in windows gets the first IP, it seems to keep that one for god knows how long, so essentially, parts of my platform is suddenly incapable of getting the updates. Yes, yes, it's the client's fault, and it does work better when I turn off DNS Client, but this is something the producers should've taken into account is the default behaviour on windows. It gets better. It will, while the machines are having problems downloading the updates, decide to turn OFF this autoupdate mechanism. Apparently at random, too. So now I have half a platform which can't download their updates because the FTP server they're told to ask doesn't work, and the other half isn't downloading their updates because the entire update mechanism is turned off. What kind of oversized turd thought of THIS nugget of gold? Where the fuck do they think this will ever help? And why the hell doesn't the machines update themselves the instant I then reactivate auto-update? No, just to ADD to this hate, they've apparently decided to require me to log on to EACH AND EVERY goddamned machine and manually press an "update now" button. I am beginning to think a frontal lobotomy would be preferable to working with this stinking pile of shite. -- -jan
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