At this time of year my focus changes from IT to LIONEL infrastructure. It’s time to begin building this year’s Christmas layout! Ah, the joy of no project plan or business case! And looking at the calendar, Christmas day is quite visible on the horizon, so I need to get moving.
With Christmas being on a Friday this year, the early days of that week will likely not be the most productive in the IT shop as the staff winds down the year with inter-office daytime soireés , extended “lunch hours” for last-minute shopping, vacation time, and so on. From a online availability standpoint, this is clearly not the time to be making any major changes to your critical systems.
Here are a few ideas for redeeming the time during the slow days before Christmas Eve – those days when few creatures are stirring in your shop:
- Check your software patch levels. Are you up to date on critical systems? If not, make plans to get current after the holidays.
- Check you hardware maintenance agreements. Is all your gear covered? How about the hardware that’s going out of warranty Real Soon Now? Are all you agreements current?
- Check your software licenses. Are you using more than you own? Funny how that creeps up without notice. You may want to square up with your vendors at year-end fire sale prices rather than wait until January.
- Have your sysadmin’s check the free disk space across your server farm. Is it time to order more storage, or simply clean out the dead wood? If a file hasn’t been referenced in the last 12 months, archive it or ask the file owner if you may simply delete it.
- Check for unnecessary VM sprawl. Do you have virtual servers that you can decommission?
- Review your backup strategy. Are all of your critical systems included properly?
- Test your recovery capability. Try to recovery a file, a database, and perhaps even an entire server from backup.
- Declare email bankruptcy and ask your users to do the same. Don’t start 2010 with 2+GB’s of personal email. Refuse to be part of the highest form of pack rattery and digital waste known to man.
- Review your Internet bandwidth usage. Do you need more or can you do with less? Do you need to have a chat with any abusive power surfers?
- Review your private bandwidth usage and contracts. Are you nearing the end of any contracts? Is it time to start shopping for better rates?
This is not a list of really exciting stuff to be sure, but they are all important, low-risk things you can do in the inevitable pre-Christmas lull to get your shop off to a good start in 2010.
Christmas Movie Review Department
There are many renditions of Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” to chose from. Arguably two of the best star Alistar Sim and George C. Scott, respectively. I personally prefer the George version , but you can’t go wrong with either. You need at least one of these in your collection.
Christmas Train Department
Also, if you don’t have a train under your Christmas tree and you have kids, grand kids, or you just know kids in your neighborhood, you really ought to head to a hobby shop and check out the Lionel starter sets. This one will look especially fine under your tree:
//spk
