Cutting Downtime to Seconds: Maintenance in a DOCSIS Environment

Impact to production is always a loss. Avoiding it takes either unusual strategy, or a level of preparation people aren’t used to. That prep, when done well, really creates returns beyond expectations; or even systems capabilities.

Most planned maintenance I encountered early in my career was… polite. Engineers would sequence upgrades by port, numerically and hope that we could get it done before the window closed. It was clean and easy from the engineer’s perspective.

But as a co-worker said: “There’s no please or thank you in the maintenance window.”

He was right- these port-by-port methods were just too polite. It also meant I was doing 300 squats a night at least. See, I hate squats almost as much as I hate customer impact.

The problem wasn’t complex- the interface has nothing to do with the rack location. The source port might be 1/0/5, but that doesn’t tell you where the cable work is. So following the logical order meant lots of walking, and every second spent walking is downtime.

I suggested going by rack- the response was

“We can’t, we don’t know where everything is. It’d take too long.”

I said, “I’ve got a spreadsheet, a wireless keypad, and eyes. Give me an hour.”

Before each maintenance, I’d walk through and map the gear to the spreadsheet. Sort that sheet by rack and hand out the new, physical-first migration plan.

“These are your three racks tonight. Stay in them. Everything you need is here. Follow the sheet.”

This sliced our downtime viciously. One night, we ran a maintenance so cleanly it didn’t even show up on the outage report. My boss assumed we had canceled it. We performed so well that impact wasn’t even known.

This isn’t genuis work. It’s lazy in the best way - the kind of lazy that saves time and gets you out of the building before sunrise.

Stop pretending logical maps are physical reality.

Got your own field maintenance war stories? I’ll talk shop for more than you want me to. greg@urg.systems