“Look at her! Isn’t she beautiful? Ahhh, that smell.” Carsten’s fingers were running gently across the black case of their new colleague, a Blade Server with dozens of cores and hundreds of Gigabyte of storage, inspecting all those little details here and there. “I think I’ll call her Babette!”
“Well, finally we got it.” Mike completely ignored Carsten’s gibberish. It has “only” been three month since their Virtual Servers have been “accidently” canceled by “the Admins” in “the HQ”, leaving half of the Software Development department without a reasonable development environment all of a sudden. Good for “the Admins” that HQ was about 800km from their office. Too far away for a spontaneous visit or, let’s say, a Team Building Exercise.
After that incident it was decided to place a server right in the office, so that the Development Team could set up Virtual Hosts as needed and without going the long route via “the Admins”. Everybody was quite excited, yes, even – happy! A way of happiness only developers can understand.
“So, when will the server be configured?” Stephen asked. A good question.
“The Admins told us this will be done next week.” Mike replied.
Just one month later, and after a couple of friendly reminders, they received an email from “the Admins”. The server is now ready to be tested, please let us know if you need anything, et cetera, blabla.
The Devs responded quickly: “Guys, we can’t even access the server with the credentials you gave us. Please tell us what we are doing wrong!”. Although they were no “Admins”, the Devs were a bit skilled with that stuff from their everyday work, but still there was a chance that the error was on their side.
Needless to say that the admins reply came promptly after another week, and yes, after some not-so-friendly-anymore reminders. “Oh well, the server has crashed somehow, but we fixed that now”.
“Buckle up guys, we’re almost there. I can access the server now!” Carsten shouted through the office.
Surely some useful stuff was missing, but at least the basic setup was ok. So everyone inspected it, writing down what would be needed for a standard development environment, which would then act as image for the Virtual Hosts later.
“All right, the email is out. It can now only be a matter of days until we can start working on it.” said Mike, still trying to be optimistic, but with a noticeable amount of skepticism. Too many lessons they learned the hard way.
Days passed.
“What do they mean, we are not allowed to setup the Virtual Hosts by ourselves?? I thought this is our development server, it is not even reachable from outside of the companies VLAN, why should we ask THEM all the time?!”. Dang. Situation got critical.
More days passed. Then they got another email…
“So it seems our new colleague hasn’t made it through the probation phase”. Mike sighed as he pulled the power. The only noise in the silence was the sound of the fans getting slower and slower.
The Dev Team has been informed that currently there are no spare resources to take care of the development server, and they shouldn’t expect it to be available within the next 6 months.
The fans finally stopped spinning.
Good bye, Babette.
