"routine maintenance" requires computer servers to be completely shut down anyway. Oh that's right, the City apparently doesn't believe in backup computer systems.
Unless "routine maintenance" is the City of Boston's equivalent of "signal delays" on the T. That is, the "all purpose" phrase for when their system falls apart.
After reading the next-to-useless Globe article on the complete, city-wide, automobile lockdown coming this Sunday, I thought to go to the City of Boston web site to see if it had better information on the coming—can I say it?—Bikocalypse.
This is what I got: The City of Boston website will be unavailable from 2:00pm-4:30pm for routine maintenence.
So, roadman wins the prize. It's an all purpose phrase for when their system needs to go down.
It's hard to have it both ways with government services...
You hold government to the standard of private business and say "who would do this?" Plenty of companies do web site maintenance that requires taking the site down for upgrades from time to time. They, however, do it at 2am on a Sunday morning, when few would notice.
But... we are quite vocal about keeping costs and "lavish perks" down, so you don't pay people overtime to do things that could just be done in the middle of the workday.
Imagine the posting that IT staff would be there in the middle of the night to upgrade the servers:
"Why are we paying those hacks overtime? Can't servers be updated during the day? Plus now we have to keep the lights and the heat on for these bozos to sit and stare at a black screen."
You can have them act like business, you can have them run at the absolute lowest cost, but it's usually impossible to do both.
(Note, the lowest cost possible is NOT the lowest cost a reasonable person would expect to get a quality job done while also providing high-quality services to customers.)
First, I would agree with you if this were, oh, 1999, and all the site did was provide state pages of information.
But it's not, and that site also serves an important e-commerce function (parking tickets and auto excise payments, for example). Granted, it's not like the city will be losing that much income because of downtime (it's not like somebody can decide to pay their excise bill in another city), but it is a potential inconvenience to people who had been planning to pay their bills.
Plus, we're no longer talking about just timeless information, such as the address of City Hall. I got e-mail today about some zoning hearings related to Allston/Brighton. I wanted to see what they were about, but couldn't because the site is down. I know, I know, too much complaining about having to wait, but imagine if the BPL catalog were down for 2 1/2 hours.
As for expensive overtime, the city says the site would be down for 2 1/2 hours. Given the way IT works, would it be that unreasonable to ask workers to either come in early and leave early or come in late and leave late?
Considering it was less than 10 years ago that you had to go down to City Hall (time, effort, inconvenience) and only during specific seemingly-random hours during the normal work week to do everything that's available online now (not that everything is available online)...I'd say it's a minor setback to lose 2-3 hours every now and then during work hours, when I can pay my bills at 1 AM if I want to.
I don't think the previous anon user was saying that the web site is not valuable. It clearly is. Instead they were criticizing the outrage which people often feel towards government and how it can be a damned if you do damned if you don't thing. As someone else implied earlier when asking about whether we really want them to spend money on backup servers, government is under constant pressure from the public to keep costs, and therefore taxes, down. The previous poster was pointing out that we get what we pay for. Having the site go down for maintenance in the middle of the night means paying however many IT guys it takes to do that extra money to come in overnight (when I used to work third shift IIRC it was the law that we got paid more than workers on other shifts). There's a problem with our conflicting priorities. We want government services to be high quality yet we don't want to pay a dime for them.
Actually, adamg could help a lot by making sure his headlines and commentary refrain from holding government to an imaginary standard of perfection... especially while forgiving for-profit corporations any number of mistakes and pretending they are perfect.
But I do expect a city service like this to be available during normal business hours. And sorry, I do expect some level of truthiness from the city - if they say the site is down for "routine maintenance," I'm going to take them at their word wonder why they have to do that during the day.
And I say all that as somebody who, yes, caused no small amount of Web-related hair pulling over in IT at a for-profit corporation. We at least had the courtesy to not put up an error page saying we were doing "routine maintenance" when something went wrong.
A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) pretty much *only* has a business presence online and through its game servers.
Mythic brings down its game servers about once a week for routine maintenance. The servers are down for about 4 hours at a time, usually on Tuesday morning at the same time as the start of the EST work day (Mythic is located in Virginia).
So, it's not unheard of for an online business to bring itself down during the day on a fairly regular basis.
Keeping web sites up is the norm every high-tech that I've worked, and the case with almost every web site I've seen.
For the rare planned downtime, network admins where I've worked usually elected to do it in the off-hours, and take flex time later. These were all salaried people without overtime pay, and they were doing it that way because that was part of doing a good job.
I'm glad you posted this. On more than a few occasions within the past week and a half I've tried accessing the City's website and received this in return.
...and I've been the sysadmin who had to take the site down!
You never write, "Yeah, my network admin has his head up his ass and our site got cracked and so I'm taking everything down to teach him how to close unnecessary ports on the routers and beef up the firewall while I clean up the servers... sigh. Do you believe that guy makes more money than I do? It must be because he has a penis and I don't..."
No. You write, "The site is down for routine maintenance. Please contact xxx-xxx-xxxx in the meantime. We apologize for any inconvenience."
You write that because you need your job and because you have bosses and investors and others who care about the appearance of things.
Unless you are the City's web admin, you don't know what happened, you don't know how they've structured their site and you don't know anything. So, please don't speculate.
Sorry to be so angry, but to expect government to be magically perfect in an imperfect world is just so stupid.
Seriously. You're making all sorts of assumptions that just make you look stupid.
Just for starters, you don't know when this incident happened and where.
You'd be better off thinking and writing about why our economy has become so bad that people are watching what they say in non-work forums for fear they will lose their jobs.
So much for "land of the free and home of the brave".
Part of being trusted as a good engineer (or similar discipline) is that you strive to give accurate information. If you say something you know not to be true, that compromises trust in you. That doesn't mean you have to be indiscreet or impolitic; just that you can't say something is "routine maintenance" when it isn't.
It's a very real standard for lots of people, including many sysadmins.
As said, it's possible to be politic without lying.
If you work in a clown shop, where you feel pressured or obligated to lie, I wouldn't tell you in this economy to quit in disgust, but you have my sympathy.
There are a number of polite unincriminating phrases one could use to explain that something is unexpectedly not working for a brief bit. If Doodlebean really can't think of any...
I went to pay my property taxes online at 11:45pm on the day they were due (hey, that's how I roll, OK?) The server was down for "routine maintenance," so I couldn't pay them until 12:30, which was the next day. Paid it, then when I went a couple days later to make sure it actually went through, found that it had accrued eight cents of interest in those 45 minutes. Which it won't even let me pay (Yes, I actually tried to do so.)
...just write off amounts below a certain level (say, $0.50 or $1.00) at the end of the month or quarter*. That may be why it reads "there is no tax due at this time".
You could call to verify, but I'd say the statement "There is no tax due at this time" covers your liability. Please keep in mind that I am just speculating. City Hall could verify for you.
Comments
Again...
Far from the first time they've pulled this stunt...
That language is the problem.
It's not a 'stunt'. It's more likely that they are doing the best they can with the limited resources they have.
Are you and your fellow citizens willing to pay more in taxes to support a 24-hour IT team? How about a special City of Boston IT tax?
If not, then you'll have to stay realistic about the level of services they can provide with what they have.
A duplicate server
would solve the problem. And it would cost far less money than a 24 hour IT team.
Disapprove
?_?
Labor first. Taxpayers
Labor first. Taxpayers second. Always.
Wow.
To see a server outage as a blow against 'the taxpayers' without knowing anything about the situation is just so TP!
Wow
I want that job.
I've always wondered what kind of
"routine maintenance" requires computer servers to be completely shut down anyway. Oh that's right, the City apparently doesn't believe in backup computer systems.
Unless "routine maintenance" is the City of Boston's equivalent of "signal delays" on the T. That is, the "all purpose" phrase for when their system falls apart.
Are you suggesting the City
Are you suggesting the City buy a second set of systems to use a few hours a month? That sound like exactly the kind of thing people complain about.
Backup servers are an important IT function
Just ask Mike Kineavy.
roadman wins the prize: cityofboston.gov is down w/ same message
After reading the next-to-useless Globe article on the complete, city-wide, automobile lockdown coming this Sunday, I thought to go to the City of Boston web site to see if it had better information on the coming—can I say it?—Bikocalypse.
This is what I got: The City of Boston website will be unavailable from 2:00pm-4:30pm for routine maintenence.
So, roadman wins the prize. It's an all purpose phrase for when their system needs to go down.
—Jonas Prang: Feeling stimulated?
City Council candidates not listed on city elections website.
City Council candidates aren't listed at http://cityofboston.gov/elections
OH NO YOU DIINT
:-o
Yes they are.
The link was right there on the link you gave.
Here, I'll help you out and give you the exact the link.
It's hard to have it both
It's hard to have it both ways with government services...
You hold government to the standard of private business and say "who would do this?" Plenty of companies do web site maintenance that requires taking the site down for upgrades from time to time. They, however, do it at 2am on a Sunday morning, when few would notice.
But... we are quite vocal about keeping costs and "lavish perks" down, so you don't pay people overtime to do things that could just be done in the middle of the workday.
Imagine the posting that IT staff would be there in the middle of the night to upgrade the servers:
"Why are we paying those hacks overtime? Can't servers be updated during the day? Plus now we have to keep the lights and the heat on for these bozos to sit and stare at a black screen."
You can have them act like business, you can have them run at the absolute lowest cost, but it's usually impossible to do both.
(Note, the lowest cost possible is NOT the lowest cost a reasonable person would expect to get a quality job done while also providing high-quality services to customers.)
Not quite that drastic
First, I would agree with you if this were, oh, 1999, and all the site did was provide state pages of information.
But it's not, and that site also serves an important e-commerce function (parking tickets and auto excise payments, for example). Granted, it's not like the city will be losing that much income because of downtime (it's not like somebody can decide to pay their excise bill in another city), but it is a potential inconvenience to people who had been planning to pay their bills.
Plus, we're no longer talking about just timeless information, such as the address of City Hall. I got e-mail today about some zoning hearings related to Allston/Brighton. I wanted to see what they were about, but couldn't because the site is down. I know, I know, too much complaining about having to wait, but imagine if the BPL catalog were down for 2 1/2 hours.
As for expensive overtime, the city says the site would be down for 2 1/2 hours. Given the way IT works, would it be that unreasonable to ask workers to either come in early and leave early or come in late and leave late?
All things considered
Considering it was less than 10 years ago that you had to go down to City Hall (time, effort, inconvenience) and only during specific seemingly-random hours during the normal work week to do everything that's available online now (not that everything is available online)...I'd say it's a minor setback to lose 2-3 hours every now and then during work hours, when I can pay my bills at 1 AM if I want to.
I don't think the previous
I don't think the previous anon user was saying that the web site is not valuable. It clearly is. Instead they were criticizing the outrage which people often feel towards government and how it can be a damned if you do damned if you don't thing. As someone else implied earlier when asking about whether we really want them to spend money on backup servers, government is under constant pressure from the public to keep costs, and therefore taxes, down. The previous poster was pointing out that we get what we pay for. Having the site go down for maintenance in the middle of the night means paying however many IT guys it takes to do that extra money to come in overnight (when I used to work third shift IIRC it was the law that we got paid more than workers on other shifts). There's a problem with our conflicting priorities. We want government services to be high quality yet we don't want to pay a dime for them.
Absolutely!
Couldn't have said it better myself.
Exactly!
Actually, adamg could help a lot by making sure his headlines and commentary refrain from holding government to an imaginary standard of perfection... especially while forgiving for-profit corporations any number of mistakes and pretending they are perfect.
I'm not expecting perfection
But I do expect a city service like this to be available during normal business hours. And sorry, I do expect some level of truthiness from the city - if they say the site is down for "routine maintenance," I'm going to take them at their word wonder why they have to do that during the day.
And I say all that as somebody who, yes, caused no small amount of Web-related hair pulling over in IT at a for-profit corporation. We at least had the courtesy to not put up an error page saying we were doing "routine maintenance" when something went wrong.
This isn't unheard of
A Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) pretty much *only* has a business presence online and through its game servers.
Mythic brings down its game servers about once a week for routine maintenance. The servers are down for about 4 hours at a time, usually on Tuesday morning at the same time as the start of the EST work day (Mythic is located in Virginia).
So, it's not unheard of for an online business to bring itself down during the day on a fairly regular basis.
That explains everything...
Our local government is a MUD!
FTFY
Our local government is
aMUD!Yeah, it happens all the time
Besides, the City of Boston can't outsource their web maintenance to Bangalore and have it worked on overnight (in our time zone).
In industry, there would be a
In industry, there would be a spare server for at least the static content of the site. A 10 year-old cheap server could do it.
And salaried industry people will do the rare downtime in off hours, without extra pay, because it's part of the job of keeping the systems working.
No, there would not be a
No, there would not be a backup server. Even a 10 year old one costs money to maintain for the what-if, or maintenance window.
Maintenance is doing during the day, because that's when the employees we pay for are there, and not getting overtime.
Done deal.
Keeping web sites up is the
Keeping web sites up is the norm every high-tech that I've worked, and the case with almost every web site I've seen.
For the rare planned downtime, network admins where I've worked usually elected to do it in the off-hours, and take flex time later. These were all salaried people without overtime pay, and they were doing it that way because that was part of doing a good job.
Not the first time
I'm glad you posted this. On more than a few occasions within the past week and a half I've tried accessing the City's website and received this in return.
How curious. Those were about
How curious. Those were about the same hours my street was without water yesterday.
It's 4:53 and the site isn't
It's 4:53 and the site isn't back yet.
Yes...
...and I've been the sysadmin who had to take the site down!
You never write, "Yeah, my network admin has his head up his ass and our site got cracked and so I'm taking everything down to teach him how to close unnecessary ports on the routers and beef up the firewall while I clean up the servers... sigh. Do you believe that guy makes more money than I do? It must be because he has a penis and I don't..."
No. You write, "The site is down for routine maintenance. Please contact xxx-xxx-xxxx in the meantime. We apologize for any inconvenience."
You write that because you need your job and because you have bosses and investors and others who care about the appearance of things.
Unless you are the City's web admin, you don't know what happened, you don't know how they've structured their site and you don't know anything. So, please don't speculate.
Sorry to be so angry, but to expect government to be magically perfect in an imperfect world is just so stupid.
Really?
And then you write a snarky comment on a blog, because you don't need the job that bad?
Yeah...
I'm sure someone's got their secretary drawing up a pink slip for a Ms. DoodleBean right now...
"Sir, is 'DoodleBean' one or two words?"
Watching too much 'Mad Men; Kaz?
Nobody has secretaries anymore. Nobody uses pink slips (except for, possibly, City Hall).
Stop jumping to conclusions!`
Seriously. You're making all sorts of assumptions that just make you look stupid.
Just for starters, you don't know when this incident happened and where.
You'd be better off thinking and writing about why our economy has become so bad that people are watching what they say in non-work forums for fear they will lose their jobs.
So much for "land of the free and home of the brave".
Part of being trusted as a
Part of being trusted as a good engineer (or similar discipline) is that you strive to give accurate information. If you say something you know not to be true, that compromises trust in you. That doesn't mean you have to be indiscreet or impolitic; just that you can't say something is "routine maintenance" when it isn't.
Again...
...holding others to a imaginary standard is just stupid. Sometimes being a good sysadmin means writing something that won't hurt your company.
It's a very real standard for
It's a very real standard for lots of people, including many sysadmins.
As said, it's possible to be politic without lying.
If you work in a clown shop, where you feel pressured or obligated to lie, I wouldn't tell you in this economy to quit in disgust, but you have my sympathy.
Ya rly
There are a number of polite unincriminating phrases one could use to explain that something is unexpectedly not working for a brief bit. If Doodlebean really can't think of any...
That shit cost me eight cents
I went to pay my property taxes online at 11:45pm on the day they were due (hey, that's how I roll, OK?) The server was down for "routine maintenance," so I couldn't pay them until 12:30, which was the next day. Paid it, then when I went a couple days later to make sure it actually went through, found that it had accrued eight cents of interest in those 45 minutes. Which it won't even let me pay (Yes, I actually tried to do so.)
The program may be set to...
...just write off amounts below a certain level (say, $0.50 or $1.00) at the end of the month or quarter*. That may be why it reads "there is no tax due at this time".
You could call to verify, but I'd say the statement "There is no tax due at this time" covers your liability. Please keep in mind that I am just speculating. City Hall could verify for you.
*The end of this quarter is December 31st.
It is?
Isn't it October 31? Taxes are due Feb 1, May 1, Aug 1 and Nov 1.
And yes, I figured it's set to not process payments that are going to cost more to process than is owed. Not exactly the point here.
No Big Surprise
The city website went out on disability. It probably will collect a pension, too.