One of my duties is to patch our servers when we find issues. Â It’s not terribly difficult but involves some things people are uncomfortable with like Remote Desktop, Drive Mapping, and the Command Line, so I gladly do it as a two-hour “Get Out of Legitimate Work Free” card. Â I wanted to patch one of our systems as a test and requested remote access as the access restrictions had changed and was surprised by the response:
Him: What would you like to do?
Me: Apply a patch to the test machine.
Him: Please provide documentation that the patch will function.
Me: I can’t, that’s why I want to try it on the test machine.
Him: I’m sorry, I cannot allow access without proof of efficacy. Â You can try applying the patch locally.
Me: So, you recommend I take the software to which we only have one license, took a specialist 3 weeks to setup, and normally requires 3 PCs in a cluster to run, and run it on my local machine?
Him: *no response*
Me: *hang up*
I’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume this person isn’t familiar with the setup. Â Work around: Create a batch file that when run produces a wall of text followed by the line “Patch Applied” and send him a screen shot of that. Â If that works, my last few weeks of work just got a lot easier.