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Doomsday Eve
by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Sm@rt Reseller, Dec 22, 99
You knew it would happen. The stockings are hung by the chimney with care,
Christmas dinner is almost ready, when the phone rings: Now, your customer wants to get ready for Y2K.
Can you do anything? Yes, you probably can, but let's get this out of the way before discussing how to handle these
11th-hour procrastinators--it's going to cost them. If they're not ready to pay for emergency service, then forget
about them.
One reason to be hard-nosed about this is that getting your people out to fix computer problems isn't going to
be cheap or easy. You most certainly have everyone on staff who can boot Windows already lined up to work on New
Year's Eve. It's going to take good will and wassail to bring them out to work on a pain-in-the-rump Y2K upgrade.
What You Can Do
In these last few days, it's still possible to check and upgrade systems and basic software programs, and with
some machines, fix BIOS.
To do that, you need three things: people, expertise and the right products. People can be the hardiest. We know
of at least one integrator that has been flying people, at the company's expense, from Texas to Maryland just to
test out and repair systems. And you know what? It's been worth it. Without the personnel, they wouldn't stand
a chance of fixing up their customers' problems.
By this time, Y2K expertise shouldn't be a problem. But if you don't have enough Y2K experienced staffers, you
can accomplish basic testing if your people are computer savvy and are equipped with the right tools.
In our interviews with integrators and resellers, we've found three programs mentioned over and over again as "must-use"
programs. The first of those is Microsoft Year 2000 Product Analyzer.
It's the Y2K program checker to end all program checkers for Microsoft operating systems and products.
Another vital program is Symantec's Norton 2000. This software package
checks both programs and hardware. It excels at fixing problems on the fly and at directing you to answers when
it can't come up with a solution.
Detecting and fixing the problem is only part of the solution, however. You also need application compliance agreements.
For that, the people we talked to recommended Zac 2001, part of Network
Associates Inc.'s Magic Total Service Desk suite. This program also does a great job of testing both software and
hardware.
Handling Emergency Y2K
Here's the Sm@rt shortlist of what to do in an emergency Y2K repair. You may notice that it doesn't include some
popular items from other Y2K preparedness lists. There's a reason for that: There's no time left for anything else.
You can consider yourself lucky if you make it through the following steps:
1 - Inventory the customer's desktops and servers.
2 - Triage to define the most important systems.
3 - Fix customer hardware.
4 - Apply software updates.
5 - Fix customer data.
Let's be realistic. It's going to take one to two man-hours to take care of the first four items per customer system.
In other words, for a 50-user network, you'll need at least a day to make sure the network is ready for another
century.
By the way, software patching is possible only if your customer is running commercial software. If someone is running
a homebrew Visual Basic program or a reseller's dBase program of years gone by, forget about trying to get it repaired
at the 11th hour.
For data, unless the information is very easy to fix, say the same two-digit date format was used in the same cell
in the same style of Excel spreadsheet throughout the company, you cannot fix data by Jan. 1, 2000. It just isn't
going to happen. Frankly, at this point, even if we thought it was doable, we wouldn't promise it.
What you can do instead is back up information at the 11th hour. That way, if some really horrible combination
of processing and data ends up wrecking the database, you at least can restore the information after the programs
are repaired.
Beyond 2000
There's more to get ready for than just the Y2K bug. We can expect to see some viral programs set to go off as
the clock strikes midnight next Friday. For those, the solution is relatively easy. Just make sure that your customer
is using up-to-date antiviral programs. To make sure they are using the latest and greatest viral files, be sure
to update the programs in the days between Christmas and New Year's Day.
There also have been many rumors of hacker attacks, and even terrorist attacks. We think that those are unlikely.
The only thing you really have to fear on Y2K is fear itself. If your customer screams on the day that they're
under attack, look toward such causes as overload from too many users trying to check the system themselves rather
than a crank with an attitude and a Pentium instead of an AK-47.
Still, double-checking the security basics of firewalls, proxy servers and the like in the last few days isn't
difficult to do. And, it's far better to catch any potential problems now rather than later.
That's something both resellers and our customers can agree on.
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