Ronald Cole wrote:
>
> I understand the desire to not have to tell hundreds or thousands of
> users that they have to exit and then restart their apps for some
> quick administration. Still, it would probably be unsettling to
> hundreds or thousands of users to suddenly have their apps all
> "freeze" for a non-trivial length of time, without being duly warned
> first, while the engine transitions into a temporary "admin mode" and
> the admin's voice mail starts filling up.

PABX paging and/or client message popups does wonders for that :-)

1st announcement: "the database will be going offline in 10 minutes so close
your current work and exit"

2nd: the database is going offline in 2 minutes
- enter graceful shutdown

3rd: the database is going down now!
Depending on the site (ie if I've been there before) they get off now. I've
seen many admins being too pussy to take it down when people are still on,
but you've got to look at it this way: 300 users have politely stopped
working, and they are waiting for the engine to come back. Meanwhile 10
arrogant or greedy users are trying to push it, and generally they know that
their local admin will just keep phoning or making announcements without
actually shutting down for 20 minutes. Therefore the decent 300 users are
suffering because of the selfish few.

So I tell them; the next announcement should be "Andrew Hamm from Civica is
shutting the engine down now. Any unfinished work will now be lost". And
down the engine goes. They never try that trick again, and they learn a bit
of respect for their admin, and the admin learns that they can have a bit of
Ballz and force people to cooperate.

We're administrating FOR the users, so we've got to look after the majority
not the minority.

Thus Endeth The Lessone :->

See also http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html
--
Andrew Hamm
HardCore Punk Administrator
3rd row from the front, Moshpit.