Blogging has been pretty low on my priorities of late, but I assure you I haven’t fallen off the map. I’ve got a lot of irons in the fire now, but I think I can work blogging back into my routine despite that.

My last week was quite challenging. That’s really what spurred me on to make a post as I had something I wanted to journal. It all started off on Monday with my first few minutes at the office. I checked on our server like I do every weekday morning to make sure things were running as they should. My backup application was reporting an error during the last backup process. While I was looking into the source of the error, the system was running extremely sluggish. I checked the RAID configuration and it showed that one of the three hard drives had failed. That’s not actually a big deal as usually, I can reboot the system and the RAID controller will come to its senses (it had been failing) and recognize all the drives and rebuild the one it “thought” had failed. I asked everyone to log off while I rebooted but also to grab any files off the server they needed for projects they were working on. I had the server reboot… but it didn’t. It got hung on the restart then did the folder/question mark thingy which is the servers way of letting me know it can’t find anything to boot off of. That’s never good. Anyway, I was eventually able to check on my RAID configuration and it showed TWO drives as failed. This presents a significant problem. Also, the indicator lights on the drives that should have shown me they had failed were all green – not the red that they should be. GAH!

If all that wasn’t enough, that evening we had some of the worst storms in years blow through the area toppling trees and cutting power all over the place. My car got hammered by the hail and has several dents in it as a result.

Tuesday started off with the outgoing mail server we use flaking out. It eventually started working but it’s frustrating all the same. I needed to move our server rack into my office so I could work on a temporary solution to my dead server issue. Before I could do that, I had to get the network switch out of the rack and relocate two dozen wires. I waited till the close of business and got everything moved successfully – or so I thought.

Wednesday started off with a phone call that let me know no one could get to any resources on the network. Grrrrrr. I zipped on in to see what was amiss NOW. Thankfully it was an easy fix. There were 2 network cables going from the switch to our router which shouldn’t be the case… only one. I unplugged the extra cable and everything suddenly started working. I was glad it was an easy fix.

Ordered a new server too BTW. Bad news is that its coming in from overseas and will be a week or so.

Thursday… the server our accounting folks use was inaccessible. I looked in the server room and saw a tape sticking out of the tape drive – all it needed was a new tape to finish its backup and all was good to go – thank goodness. Then it was off into the heat for a few hours of photography.

Friday… our incoming mail server was flaky for a few hours. I got a trouble ticket opened up for that and it got healed a few hours later.

I could have sworn I didn’t work in I.T. anymore.