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Chapter 1. The Philosophy of System Administration

module to a faster model, and reboot. Once this is done, you will move the database itself to faster,

RAID based storage. Here is one possible announcement for this situation:

System Downtime Scheduled for Friday Night

Starting this Friday at 6pm (midnight for our associates in Berlin), all financial applications will be unavail 

able for a period of approximately four hours.

During this time, changes to both the hardware and software on the Finance database server will be per 

formed. These changes should greatly reduce the time required to run the Accounts Payable and Accounts

Receivable applications, and the weekly Balance Sheet report.

Other than the change in runtime, most people will notice no other change. However, those of you that

have written your own SQL queries should be aware that the layout of some indices will change. This is

documented on the company intranet website, on the Finance page.

Should you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact System Administration at extension

4321.

A few points are worth noting:

Effectively communicate the start and duration of any downtime that might be involved in the

change.

Make sure you give the time of the change in such a way that it is useful to all users, no matter

where they may be located.

Use terms that your users will understand. The people impacted by this work do not care that the

new CPU module has twice as much cache, or that the database will live on a RAID 5 logical

volume.

1.3.2. Tell Your Users What You Are Doing

This step is primarily a last minute warning of the impending change; as such, it should be a brief

repeat of the first message, though with the impending nature of the change made more apparent

("The system upgrade will take place TONIGHT."). This is also a good place to publicly answer any

questions you may have received as a result of the first message.

Continuing our hypothetical example, here is one possible last minute warning:

System Downtime Scheduled for Tonight

Reminder: The system downtime announced this past Monday will take place as scheduled tonight at 6pm

(midnight for the Berlin office). You can find the original announcement on the company intranet website,

on the System Administration page.

Several people have asked whether they should stop working early tonight to make sure their work is backed

up prior to the downtime. This will not be necessary, as the work being done tonight will not impact any

work done on your personal workstations.

Remember, those of you that have written your own SQL queries should be aware that the layout of some

indices will change. This is documented on the company intranet website, on the Finance page.

Your users have been alerted; now you are ready to actually do the work.