This week at work I will be resurrecting two technological artifacts that were casualties of server transitions that didn't quite cross the finish line. My organization made the move to virtualize our compliment of physical servers over the last year. While this brought much needed stabilization and operating system upgrades some of the applications these servers were meant to host never finished the migration. Two of these fall under my purview: TeamCity Build Server and XWiki.
These artifacts have some rather significant value to my team specifically.
With TeamCity my group will be able to automate builds. This will let us find errors sooner and deploy automatically to our test and production environments. The time this will save will free us up for more development and let us deliver code to production faster.
The XWiki server previously housed a storehouse of knowledge about our systems that team members that have left the company originally documented. Without this repository of information we are continually reverse engineering systems to understand their functionality. If we could access a system that answers our questions we'd be ten times more efficient than we are today.
So… My task this week is to blow the cobwebs off. Spin up the drives. Check the configurations and get these systems back in working order.
This won't be a monumental undertaking but the unknown unknowns and gotchas that always surround these types of projects are what will take the most time.
Wish me luck!
