Yadda yadda day in the life .... Arrr!
For a day that was supposed to be spent pushing paper (important paper, at that), there was remarkably little paper pushed.
I spent the first two hours of the morning helping Mark-my-unindicted-co-conspirator nurse a sick server back to health. It looks like the backplane in the server's external disk cabinet (a Dell PowerVault) failed on two slots overnight. We moved the two disks (a mirrored pair holding the servers SQL log files) into the server chassis and told the RAID card to 'figure it out'. Nothing Mark couldn't have done by himself, but it's always good to have a copilot. Especially when you're mucking around with array configurations and the distinct possibility of data loss!
The cherry on top of this sundae was the alarm on the RAID controller for the PowerVault ... which would not stop going off. Which was still bleating away this afternoon. And will keep wailing until the controller has it's config cleared and rebuilt. Back in the day, RAID cards came with a little "silence" switch sticking out the back so that you weren't driven into a killing rage by the incessant BEEP BEEP BEEP. Not this one.
The rest of the day got inhaled by the city WiFi project. I need to extract myself from this tar-baby. I have other things to do. Other things with looming deadlines. ...Which is why my week off has been truncated to Thursday and Friday off. Fah.
In other news, my PC is mer illy plugging away under Ubuntu. Printing was a snap to setup. Configuring access to my files on the Windows server in the basement still needs some work (some apps understand the connection, others don't seem to -- I may need to look at how the Samba client works to see if I can mount the Windows server's file system a la NFS). Next up (tomorrow night, probably) will be unlocking Ubuntu's ability to play DVDs and MP3s (some legal thing keeps them from shipping Ubuntu with the needed libraries). But for now, bed.
I spent the first two hours of the morning helping Mark-my-unindicted-co-conspirator nurse a sick server back to health. It looks like the backplane in the server's external disk cabinet (a Dell PowerVault) failed on two slots overnight. We moved the two disks (a mirrored pair holding the servers SQL log files) into the server chassis and told the RAID card to 'figure it out'. Nothing Mark couldn't have done by himself, but it's always good to have a copilot. Especially when you're mucking around with array configurations and the distinct possibility of data loss!
The cherry on top of this sundae was the alarm on the RAID controller for the PowerVault ... which would not stop going off. Which was still bleating away this afternoon. And will keep wailing until the controller has it's config cleared and rebuilt. Back in the day, RAID cards came with a little "silence" switch sticking out the back so that you weren't driven into a killing rage by the incessant BEEP BEEP BEEP. Not this one.
The rest of the day got inhaled by the city WiFi project. I need to extract myself from this tar-baby. I have other things to do. Other things with looming deadlines. ...Which is why my week off has been truncated to Thursday and Friday off. Fah.
In other news, my PC is mer illy plugging away under Ubuntu. Printing was a snap to setup. Configuring access to my files on the Windows server in the basement still needs some work (some apps understand the connection, others don't seem to -- I may need to look at how the Samba client works to see if I can mount the Windows server's file system a la NFS). Next up (tomorrow night, probably) will be unlocking Ubuntu's ability to play DVDs and MP3s (some legal thing keeps them from shipping Ubuntu with the needed libraries). But for now, bed.