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Monday, March 21, 2005 |
I have the first three days of this week off as a result of the
University's Spring Break--21-23 March 2004. These days off are
welcome, especially after the last 60 hours where I have had to work
way too much.
Some stuff I will be doing:
- organizing some desk clutter
- balancing the checkbook
- catching up with my mother
- possibly seeing my grandfather
6:25:44 PM 
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Thankfully, after all the beer I consumed on St. Patrick's Day, I only
had to come into work late. We had a planned outage of our
machine room where all of our servers reside. As a result, a lot
of staff were on-site to get everything properly shut down.
My boss, Chris, and I were to be on-site to shut down the servers we
are responsible for. We also had some other plans for the
evening: we were moving some servers to a rack we have down there,
moving some other servers around, and removing some servers that have
since been upgraded. Additionally, we were upgrading one of the
NetWare servers we support to NetWare 6.5.
I arrived at College Park shortly before 5 PM, with a Starbuck's latte
in hand to get ready for the evening. I fired up the laptop,
hoping to answer some email and update my blog. After that, I
would have gotten everything in order for the planned NetWare 6.5
upgrade. In a sign of things to come, this was not meant to
be.
At around 5:15 PM, one of my coworkers says that a server we support in
the Department of Physics is down. I go look at the server via
the remote access console. I notice that the boot directory is
trashed--completely. Nothing in it. I make a call to Novell
Technical Support (NTS) just to confirm my course of action, but
essentially I need to recreate that boot directory. I get
everything ready in about 40 minutes, and then I head over to the
machine room the server is located in. The work was easy to do,
but it took me about two hours to get it all done--I needed a couple of
other things in order to do this. After that, the server was
returned to working order. This was the warning sign of things to
come.
The power outage goes off without a hitch, but the upgrade was never
started before the outage. As a result, we are already running
behind schedule. I start the upgrade at around 4 AM, and all
appears well. At the last stage of the upgrade, the server
restarts and detects its hardware. Here it abends,
repeatedly. Think of a blue screen in Windows that happens at the
same point every time. I call NTS again, and they suggest
installing the server again.
The reinstall works, but the same error persists. I call NTS
back, and we go through checking the hardware drivers that load when
the server starts. We get the same error, and he seems to think
it is a hardware problem and suggests I call Dell. I, however,
disagree. My options are as follows: try and deal with Dell
Technical Support or find a way to get the server up. I decided
to get the server up--effectively reinstalling it. Chris and I get
cracking on this, and we get the server up and running in about an
hour-and-a-half. I patch the server up with all of the latest and
greatest patches. Now, we need to restore the data.
While this is going on, though, we are pestered with some additional
problems throughout the morning and into the afternoon. A couple
of servers that are supposed to be up are not. One server refuses
to boot up at all. We get these problems resolved, but when it is
all said and done, it is now 6 PM and we are beginning the restore from
tape. We have now been at work for over 24 hours.
The initial restore fails, so I call to deal with NTS again. I
try a few things, and after an hour things start to work. We see
things going, so Chris and I head back to our offices and pack up and
go. It is now 9 PM. I get home at 9:30, doing Mach 3 up
I-95 to Baltimore. I get home and check on the restore.
Well, we still run into problems. I work with my backup guy on
them, and all appears well until shortly after 11 PM. The machine
room just went down--completely. Apparently, someone forgot to
fill the tank on the diesel generator. Seeing this, I IM my
backup guy to say, I can't keep my head up, let's finish this later in
the morning.
I resume restoring things Sunday afternoon, and everything finishes up
at around 9 PM yesterday. The restores went pretty quick, but the
little interruptions that we had made it longer. Additionally,
the fact that neither one of us had any sleep or food made the work
tougher.
The bottom line--the one server that went belly up at 5 PM Friday
afternoon should have been the sign that things were not going to go
smoothly at all. And this was with a plan that has worked
repeatedly in the past. Sometimes, no amount of planning can
prepare you for that.
6:18:50 PM
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St. Patrick's Day is a day I hold in high regard. It has some
sentimental value, as my late grandmother took great pride in her Irish
heritage. She always sent me some money to enjoy a pint on that
day, and I started a tradition of enjoying the holiday in the last few
years.
I started my day at Sean Bolan's
promptly at 8 AM. The special was $1 Irish coffees and
Guinness. As I promised many others, I walked in just after 8 AM,
shoveling the bagel breakfast sandwich I picked up from Sam's Bagels
into my mouth. Unlike last year, all the seats at the bar were
full, so I settled in at the end of the bar near some other bar patrons
I know.
I was joined shortly by my neighborhood friends Kyle, Dale, and Katie
(Dale's wife). Joining us shortly thereafter were my fellow
bloggers, ACW and Kmart.
Of the group, all but Katie enjoyed some alcoholic beverages to start
the day. Dale and ACW were going to work after enjoying some
beverages, and Kmart and Kyle were going to leave later in the day and
return later.
At about 9'ish, the only folks left at the bar from our initial group
was Kyle and Kmart. That's when the drinking began in
earnest. I convinced Kmart to skip his morning class, but make
his afternoon class. At around 11, we started to get
hungry. Instead of making with some traditional Irish fare, we
instead bolted for 15 minutes to woof down some Quiznos sub (because "They got a pepper bar.")
At about 11:45 AM, we return to Bolan's and continue consuming
Guinness. I also purchase a hat that looks like a big Guinness
pint. We now have beads and pins and Guinness in our
bellies. Kmart begins pondering going to his afternoon
class. Kyle was supposed to go home and begin watching his
DirectTV ticket of NCAA College Basketball Tournament. The power
of Guinness and my drunkenness helped convince them to stay.
Shortly after 12:30, a good friend of mine George comes up from
Virginia to enjoy some Guinness and good cheer.
This group continues drinking and watching basketball until about
3'ish. At that time, we are joined by my coworker Vlad.
Also coming in around this time for a between-work beverage was
ACW. At that time, Kmart leaves to do some stuff at home.
Also joining us around this time--following the invite made on
Wednesday night--was messy_hair_girl. ACW leaves to return to work as well.
This group continues until about 4'ish, when we are joined by my friend
Shorty and his better-half, Karen. We promise to meet up later at
J. Patrick's in Locust Point. Some of his peeps made an
appearance as well. This group continues, being joined by Dale
and Katie again. Also joining us at this point was Fool.
This is when the madness of multiple Irish Car Bombs in very short
order begins. My drink tally before the Irish Car Bombs begins is
as follows:
1 Irish Car Bomb
3 Irish Coffees
13 Guinness
We then proceed to suck down 3 Irish Car Bombs in a span of 40 minutes. Damn you, Shorty.
After the Car Bombs, Vlad leaves. The rest of us leave Shorty and
his peoples to head to Captain Larry's. For some stupid reason,
two more Car Bombs are consumed there. I also sucked down a
couple of Guinness while we were there, refueling with cheese fries and
crab dip. At this point, time becomes a bit hazy for me.
We finally end the evening at J. Patrick's in Locust Point. It
was quite crowded. Our group now included Kyle, his fiancee Gina,
Frank, Fool, Brian, messy_hair_girl, and myself. I do not
remember how we got down there, but a Guinness is thrust in my hand and
the Irish music is playing in the background. At this point, we
see Kmart and ACW and some of their friends.
To beat some of the crowd, we step outside to enjoy some Natty Bohs
from the trunk of ACW's car. Ahhh, yes, Baltimore. How I
love the ability to enjoy beer in the street. My other friends
have went home at this point. So, Fool, ACW, Kmart, and some
other friends are kicking it. Inside is messy_hair_girl.
At the end of the night, we get everyone together, and make the run for
pizza near my place. Of course, the pizza did not get eaten until
the next morning, as I passed out when I got home. It was still
damn good the next day.
I will post a link to
the photos chronicling this day once I download them and upload them to
something like Flickr. Yes, there are photos.
5:55:35 PM
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I have been somewhat remiss in updating my blog, but the last five days
have been at a crazy pace, to say the least. More on that is
coming in later posts.
Last Wednesday night was the Baltimore Blogger Happy Hour at Dizzy
Issies. I had a good time seeing some of my old friends and
making some new ones. All of the old friends know who they are,
as they are on the blogroll to the left. The new ones, though,
included:
Something made made it even more fun? There were non-bloggers who
made the event. You know who you are, lurkers. It took the
non-bloggers a heck of a lot of courage to come out and introduce
themselves to a group they have only read--and a very large group at
that.
Again, it was fun seeing old and new friends. I realize there were some people who I did not meet, but it is hard to
go introducing yourself to everybody. Next time, can I suggest the
ultimate dorkiness of nametags for the next Happy Hour?
5:15:15 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Jason J. Thomas.
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AIM: jjtaim MSN: jasonjthomas@hotmail.com Yahoo! Messenger: jasonjthomasumd
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