Mitigating human error in the SP

Brian Raaen braaen at zcorum.com
Wed Feb 3 13:47:51 UTC 2010


Reminds me of the saying, nothing is foolproof given a sufficiently talented 
fool.  I do agree that checklist, peer reviews, parallel turnups, and lab 
testing when used and not jury rigged have helped me prepare for issue.  
Usually when I skipped those things are the time I kick myself for not doing 
it.  Another thing that helps is giving yourself enough time, doing what you 
can ahead of time, and being ready on time.  Just my two bits.

-- 

----------------------

Brian Raaen
Network Engineer
braaen at zcorum.com


On Tuesday 02 February 2010, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
> Never said it was, and never said foolproof either.  Minimizing the
> chance of error is what I'm after - and ssh'ing in + hand typing
> configs isn't the way to go.
> 
> Use a known good template to provision stuff - and automatically
> deploy it, and the chances of human error go down quite a lot. Getting
> it down to zero defect from there is another kettle of fish altogether
> - a much more expensive with dev / test, staging and production
> environments, documented change processes, maintenance windows etc.
> 
> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Michael Dillon
> <wavetossed at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >
> > It is easy to create a tangled mess of OSS applications that are glued 
together
> > by lots of manual human effort creating numerous opportunities for human 
error.
> > So while I wholeheartedly support automation of network configuration, 
that is
> > not a magic bullet. You also need to pay attention to the whole process, 
the
> > whole chain of information flow.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists at gmail.com)
> 
> 





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