When I do upgrades and patching, everyone knows. Well, only a select few actually know it's me, but they tell everyone. Things go something like this:
I decide things need to be patched/upgraded/installed/whatever. (Today I got a security bulletin that said "The information in this Security Bulletin should be acted upon as soon as possible." HP only says that when they have to, so I took notice. It includes a reboot of every single machine I have, including the University Database servers. The DBA team was looking for an excuse for an outage for some tuning, (they didn't want to be the ones to suggest it) so they were happy about it.)
I then test the changes and schedule the outage.
The people involved with the scheduling of the outage invariably talk for 30 minutes about when to do it, then nearly always decide I picked the right time. (If they ask if the outage has to occur, which they rarely do when I post it, the answer this time, as always is 'yes'.)
Then they tell everyone. Sometimes I worry that they will start giving out too much information. I always get asked the scope, what they should say, how long it will be, and so on, and I always say: Why can't you just use the exact same wording as the last time I brought everything down?
Anyway, if you are ever on the home page, or on the university portal, and you see something to the effect of everything being down some night from 12am - 6am, you can take it to the bank that it's me who is doing it.
Sometimes it's just fun to throw around phrases like "mandatory patching" and stuff like that, it balances out the scales a little.
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