Problem in PA

And it would seem our governor convened a panel to look at the issue in an attempt to make it seem like he cares, then basically told everyone the outage would go head as planned.

I would be very concerned, if the State Police IT staff isn't good enough to do a no-outage cut over, that this will last longer than 3 days, and possibly not result in the system actually getting all the upgrades it needs.

You know the sad thing? I took all of one database class back at Georgia Tech, and I honestly believe I could muddle through a seamless database upgrade, even though that class was two years in the past. At the very least, all you need are two machines - clone the database to the second, leave the second maching up and take the first one offline, upgrade the first, and then swap over (making sure to carry over any changes from the second database to the first). Boom. Done.

I may be oversimplifying things, but, still... any competent IT could easily perform an in-line upgrade, without any loss of uptime. A halfway competent one could manage it with just a few hours of downtime. But a weekend? And Labor Day Weekend at that?

Yeah, I am with Sebastian... something tells me something will somehow go horribly wrong...

I teach Database and have done it for many years and you are right it is a fairly simple process.

There are factors though to consider things that any competent DBA would have in place in the first place.

Given that I suspect that they only have one machine and the upgrades are to the OS and the DB software and I would be worried like hell that something did not apply right and everything would be down the tubes.

This strikes me as either a rube goldberg operation or a conscious decision to play a game. This type of stuff happens everyday at mid to large firms, I went through a complete transfer of data center years ago over a weekend not just an upgrade.

as holmes said the game is afoot!

This is pushing the envelope to see how much suspension of the constitution the state can get away with. This is a trial balloon. Soon there will be other reasons to suspend the constitution and this will be pointed to as precedent justifying it.

Yeah, I know. You all think I am paranoid. Please hold that opinion in abeyance for a bit. You will see it happen before Rendell is out of office.

I was a consultant on the transition of Pennsylvania's current EBT system from an evaluation project in Berks County to statewide operation. We had to transfer the entire system, hardware, software, network connections and help lines, from Reading to Harrisburg. The system was down roughly from midnight to 6AM. I guess they don't cope with technology as well under Ed Rendell as they did 20 years ago, or maybe they just screw with gun owners and dealers.

If you said newspapers couldn't publish for three days it would be the same thing. Which is ANOTHER reason why pre-sale government approvals are wrong (and ought to be unconstitutional as presuming guilt, rather than innocence). If you can't buy a gun and its ammo, the right to keep and bear them is surely infringed.

I'm thinking that the gun show in Allentown this weekend will suffer greatly. Government incompetence strikes again.