UNIVERSITY OF FUJAIRAH

College of Information Technology

BNS-4163 Network and System Administration

(11)
Maintenance Windows
Slides for a Course Based on the Textbook
The Practice of System and Network Administration
Limoncelli, T. et al. (3rd edition )

Modified By Dr. Ahmed Khalifa

1 2022-2023
 Outline

• Process Overview
• Getting Management Buy-In
• Scheduling Maintenance Windows
• Planning Maintenance Tasks
• Selecting a Flight Director
• Managing Change Proposals
• Developing the Master Plan
• Disabling Access

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 Process Overview

• A maintenance window is by definition a short period in

which a lot of systems work must be performed.
• It is often disruptive to the rest of the company, so the
scheduling must be done in cooperation with the
customers.
• During the maintenance window, a group of SAs must
perform various tasks.
• The flight director technique guides the activities before
the window, during execution, and after execution
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 Three Stages of a Maintenance Window

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 Getting Management Buy-In

• Before you can schedule a maintenance window, you will need to

get approval from management.
• SAs often like to have a maintenance window during which they
can take down any and all systems and stop all services,
because that approach reduces complexity and makes testing
easier.
• Some companies may not agree to a large scheduled outage for
maintenance.
• When a schedule for maintenance windows is agreed upon with
management, all members of the team must commit to high
5 availability for their systems.
 Scheduling Maintenance Windows

• You must work with the rest of the company to

coordinate dates when maintenance will occur.
• You need to avoid dates so that the sales team can
enter rush orders and the accounting group can
produce financial reports for that period.
• You must set and publicize the schedule months in
advance, so that the rest of the company can plan
around those times.

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 Planning Maintenance Tasks

• The tasks involved in scheduled maintenance need to be

planned by the individuals performing them, so that no one tries
anything unexpected.
• You need to plan ahead:
• If you have one maintenance window per quarter, you need to make sure
that the work you do this quarter will hold you through the end of the next
quarter, so that you won’t need to bring the system down again.
• The SAs need to plan far enough in advance to allow time to get
quotes, submit purchase orders and get them approved, and
have any new equipment arrive a week or so before the
maintenance window.
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 Selecting a Flight Director (1 of 2)

• The flight director is person responsible for:

• crafting the announcement notices and making.
• sure that they go out on time.
• scheduling the submitted work proposals based on.
• the interactions between them and the staff required.
• deciding on any cuts for that maintenance window.
• monitoring the progress of the tasks during the maintenance window.
• ensuring that the testing occurs correctly.
• communicating status to the rest of the company at the end of the
maintenance window.

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 Selecting a Flight Director (2 of 2)

• A large multinational company that has periodic global maintenance

windows, spanning datacenters in several different time zones, needs
to have a team of flight directors, one in each geographic region, who
hand off to each other in a “follow the sun” manner.

• For a company with a single campus, or several campuses in one

time zone, the person who fills the role of flight director should be a
senior SA who is capable of assessing work proposals from other
members of the SA team.

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 Managing Change Proposals (1 of 2)

• One week before the maintenance window, all change proposals should
have been submitted.
• A good way of managing this process is to have all the change proposals
online in a revision-controlled area.
• Each SA edits documents in a directory with his or her name on it.
• The documents supply all the required information.

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 Managing Change Proposals (2 of 2)
A change proposal form should answer at least the following questions:
• What change are you going to make?
• Why are you making the change?
• Which machines will you be working on?
• What are the pre–maintenance window dependencies and due dates?
• What needs to be up for the change to happen?
• Which services or applications will be affected by the change?
• Will there be a disruption in services during the change? For how long?
• Who is performing the work?
• How many additional helpers are required? Anyone specific?
• How long will the change take in active time and elapsed time, including testing?
• What are the implementation steps?
• What are the test procedures? Which equipment do they require?
• What is the backout procedure, and how long will it take?
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 Sample Change Proposal: Storage Migration ( 1 of 2)

• What change are you going to make?

Move /home/de105 and /db/gene237 from anaconda to anachronism.
• Why are you making the change?
We are running out of space on anaconda and we need to move some data
onto another file server that has more room to grow.
• Which machines will you be working on?
anaconda, anachronism, and shingen.
• What are the pre–maintenance window dependencies and due dates?
Extra disk shelves for anachronism need to be delivered and installed; due to
arrive September 17 and installed by September 21. Perform backups the night
before the window.
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 Sample Change Proposal: Storage Migration ( 2 of 2)

• What needs to be up for the change to happen?

The network, console service, and internal authentication services.
• Which services or applications will be affected by the change?
Network traffic on 172.29.100.x network, all accounts with home directories
on /home/de105—a list of affected users is attached—and database access to
Gene237.
• Will there be a disruption in services during the change? For how long?
Yes. For the duration of the change window, the affected users will not be able
to log in, and the Gene237 database will be unavailable.
• Who is performing the work?
Greg Jones, Systems Associate, Storage and Services Division.
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 Developing the Master Plan
• One week before the maintenance window, the flight director
freezes the change proposals and starts working on a master plan,
which takes into account all the dependencies and elapsed and
active times for the change proposals.
• The result is a series of tables, one for each person, showing which
task each person will perform during which time interval and
identifying the coordinator for that task.
• The individual tables are collated and redacted into a master chart
that shows all the tasks that are being performed over the entire
time, who is performing them, the team lead, and what the
dependencies are.
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 Disabling Access

• First task during a maintenance window is to disable or discourage system

access and provide reminders about the maintenance window.
• This process may involve the following steps:
1. Placing on all doors into the campus buildings notices with the maintenance
window times clearly visible.
2. Disabling all remote access to the site, whether by VPN, dedicated lines, or
wireless.
3. Making an announcement over the public address system in the campus
buildings to remind everyone that systems are about to go down.
4. Changing the helpdesk voicemail message to announce the ongoing
maintenance window and state when normal service should be restored.
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 Questions

Thank you!
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