The only way out is through...

[sawyl]

Rather dispiriting day spent crawling through the logs, investigating a series of connected scheduling problems. Despite their superficial dissimilarities, almost all the problems had a comment fingerprint: a timeout of some sort. Having concluded that the timeouts were caused by on-going maintenance on the storage subsystem, I found myself in the unfortunate position of being required to tell a number of unlucky users that there was no immediate solution, and the only thing we could do was push on with the work and hope for a happy ending...