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At some point hitherto, Jerry Feldman hath spake thusly:
> On 19 Apr 2002 at 15:46, Drew Taylor wrote:
> > Excellent idea! Now if I can just get a CD burner in my linux box, I can do 
> > the same thing and automate it too. I really need a backup plan, since my 
> > non-existent plan is sure to bite me in the butt one day.
> When you are up to your ass in aligators, it is not the time to drain the 
> swamp :-)

Honestly Jerry, after spending the first three years of my system
administration career largely in a constant state of alligators
snapping at my behind, I've learned that sometimes that's the best
time to drain the swamp....

It might take a little bit of extra time, but if you spend the extra
time *up front* to get a workable, permanent, scalable solution to the
problems you face, you never see those aligators again...  And that's
definitely worth something.  Said another way, solving a problem the
right way may well incur a little bit of extra down time NOW, but will
save you an immense amount of down time in the long haul (and very
possibly the short haul too).  It will also save a great deal of
administration time maintaining a broken solution.

Sometimes it's hard to convince the user community (people are often
extremely short-sighted), in which case being "creative" is often very
helpful. :)

Of course, it's far better to have a plan to migrate in an orderly
fasion, but if the systems are down anyway...  :)  Often it's very
difficult to sell planned down time to the user community.  You have
to take advantages of opportunities that arise.  

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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