You want to what, biznatch?

I have come to accept the fact that maybe I'm not overpaid, I'm just undercolleagued.

Upgrading a production Solaris box has never been a first choice or even a good choice but I was asked today to help a guy out in California on our ship of fools. He has a Solaris machine running the backups, an E450 running 2.6 32-bit, and they need it to be running 2.8 64-bit as the limitations in 2.6 are becoming a problem.

One of the guys who is a 'Sr.' Unix admin down in Dallas informs me cheerfully that he has opened a ticket with Sun and that Sun doesn't think it will be a problem. It is immediately clear to me he has never dealt with Sun as noone who has endured the pain of 10 years with Sun support would buy that line in a minute. Right. Don't get me wrong, I'm completely owned by Sun, I'm their #1 Biotch but I know a raft of shit when I see it go by zooming for the falls. You don't do a production upgrade from 32-bit to 64-bit skipping a version or two in the process. Ever...well, you can but don't be paging my ass at 4am wanting my sympathy or help. My evil unsympathetic cackle will be free of charge after 11am though.

Finally after I wheedle an important detail, "Oh, it was hung for a week and noone noticed it", out of the lead backup engineer I got them to agree to a clean install, especially after taking a look at the filesystems on the existing machine. *sigh* Where do people go to learn how to fuck-up systems this amazingly? Now I'll just have to wait a week for them to find the Solaris 8 media and somehow manage to get a serial console that I can use as they turned down my request for Cisco console servers and are still arguing over which brand and model to use. I've been sucked into the Dilbert Zone.