All this « editorial » content is so unnerving with so much shit happening in the world. It does not feel like a safe place if you doomscroll every time you browse it…

  • Anecdote #1: Don’t put yourself in a position where you’ve got a bunch of servers that you have to upgrade from 2008 to 2019.

    Anecdote #2: The warnings against doing in-place Windows Server upgrades can’t stop you if you don’t read them.

      • In our case, there are a bunch of benefits and reasons:

        • Active Directory (plus certificate services, but I don’t personally touch those at all)
        • A lot of our software here in healthcare is legacy stuff that works on Windows and only on Windows
        • My boss is used to Windows and is far too busy and old to want to learn something different
        • Windows Server is generally okay and comes with some handy management features built-in

        We do have some systems that are on Linux (Photon OS for VMware stuff, a couple of vendor-implemented Ubuntu systems). We don’t really have much to do with these system, though. I’m the only one here who’s familiar with *nix stuff, and while I’ve tried implementing stuff like our Intranet server on Ubuntu Server, I eventually moved over to Windows Server with IIS because it was just easier for my coworkers to access and use.

        As for containerization, we have so many servers that do one thing and only one thing. Docker would be awesome, but it’s sadly just really not a thing in our slice of the healthcare and IT sector. We do plan to start moving to a hybrid cloud model with Azure, but that probably won’t be for a few years.

      • Going okay so far. We’ve had a lot going on this week, so I didn’t want to touch any of our critical systems for fear of adding even more shit to the plate for my coworkers. The non-critical system upgrades went smoothly. You can’t upgrade from 2008 R2 straight to 2019, so I do an intermediary upgrade to 2012 first (hooray, the Windows 8 start screen!) VMware’s mouse driver seems to break during the upgrade, and my RDP doesn’t like connecting to 2012 servers, so I have to navigate by keyboard to the file explorer to start the upgrade from 2012 to 2019. There’s probably a better way to do this, but I can’t be bothered to find it.