Wow, it's been a long time. Time to rant, though. Been too damn busy to rant for a while...
For work, one of the ways that I bring revenue into the company is as an outside consultant/admin type thing. The company has a contract with an annonymous university nearby, which says that I (by name) will make sure that nothing crazy happens to their large, highly redundant, well-setup email system. Nice enough, I think work thought that it would be a simple thing, no problems.
There were problems. Of course, there were problems.
Starting on Monday morning or so, the large email system started failing over to it's backup. This is a fairly quick process, as the backup is partially booted already, and only really results in a 5 minute or so interruption of services. Not bad. Thing is, it didn't just do this once as a freak occurence... nope, no cosmic rays to blame here... a few hours later? BAM -- failed over again... and again, and again...
Support for the product suggested some interesting things, which didn't actually manage to fix it. Finally, by Friday afternoon, support announced they would ship out a replacement part, and being the idiot that I am, and it seeming like the client is not interested in being there Saturday, I told them Monday delivery would be the way to go. Ah well, it should work out.
In the meantime, though, a drive has failed... they're of course in a RAID setup, and a hot spare has taken over -- so I don't have to take any action until a new drive is in... but the damn thing is sending SMS to my phone telling me every few hours or so that a drive has failed... and here I am trying to keep this thing in reasonable shape until Monday evening or so when we can start replacing crap.
BAH!
Looking in the mirror last night, and with the 4 times or so that I was up to babysit the system while it rebuilt everything, I think I might be getting that haggard, frightened admin look again. damn.
And now we play the waiting game... maybe it will stay up for most of the rest of the weekend... but I'm doubting it. In fact, I'm half expecting to get another alert from it any time now.
Since this is the second weekend in a row that I'm losing the majority of to work related things (last was unrelated; travel, and not the whole weekend) -- it's going to take a lot more than a generic "Thanks, good job!" pat on the back and such from $boss to make me happy...
Damnit.
More problems with other machinery coming soon to a post near you.
