Current mood:

exhausted

I love my job...
I was fretting yesterday because I only worked 10 hours instead of my usual 12 last week (because I took Friday off), and therefore I have(/had) to work 14 hours this week to pull my usual 24 hour twoweekage. Well, I ain't frettin' no more, let me tell ya.

(For those of you who are worrying because this isn't about driving... it was either this or nothing for the next week, so I figured I'd continue my driving saga at some later point and amuse you now with my day today.)

I shattered my previous record of how late I stayed at work today... my previous record? 8PM. The new one? 1AM. Yes, that's right, I worked 12 hours today... 12PM to 1AM with roughly an hour for dinner while my boss went home to grab the NT Server Install CD. So, I was on campus from around 7:30 yesterday morning until 1 this morning... a cool seventeen and a half hours for those who can't count right. What the hell happened, you ask?

Well, let me explain.

I got to work and heard my boss explaining to someone else that we were trying to recover the Z: drive. The Z: drive is where the nurses keep all the stuff that they work on with other nurses (as opposed to the P: drive, which is their own personal crap), and happens to be the drive that the Dean works off of exclusively. Lovely how that works, isn't it? I asked what happened, and it turns out that nurmain—our primary domain controller and the file server that hosts profiles, P: and Z: drives—had crashed. It had frozen and wouldn't boot properly. So, everything else I was working on suddenly became not so important, and I started to tackle the problems with nurmain.

Let me tell you a bit about nurmain. She's a beautiful beast, if you like beastly things. Her specs include:

• Dual 300mhz Pentium processors


• Two massive power supplies that supply upwards of 300W a piece


• Five or more gigantic 120mm fans


• The marvelous Windows NT Server operating system


• Lots of other joyous crap that is prone to fail at any given time

Oh yes, I'm sure you're incredibly envious that I get to work with such a powerful machine. Did I mention the half-an-inch thick coating of dust that got all over my nice creme shirt? Yeah, that was fun too.

Anyways, my boss called Microsoft, and got what you'd expect from a company when you ask them about support for an operating system that's 6? 7? 8? years old... "Windows NT? We don't support that. Time to get a new server." Dell's support said basically the same thing.

So, we were pretty much on our own.

Long story short, it turns out the RAID controller had gone bad. This wasn't just any RAID controller either, it was an über-card (12" PCI card, for those not in the know... absolutely massive by anyone's standards). How did we figure this out? Well, by hitting our heads against the wall for a long time before finally trying my original idea (my boss is very smart, but I tend to get lucky when it comes to these sort of troubleshooting situations) and throwing the über-card into another PC, using just nurmain's backplane and another computer to access the drives themselves. Once we did this and realized that it crashed that PC as well, we swapped it out for another RAID controller (from the server which we also got fixed today, thanks to a long but productive call to Dell support) and it worked like a charm. Upon trying to put this newer RAID card in nurmain though, we realized that it was just too new or nurmain was just too old, so when I left we had Server 2003 installing on a PC with the RAID card in it, with a SCSI cable sticking out the back that was connected to nurmain's backplane. I call it nurfranken meself (it's late, so I find it amusing...)

That pretty much sums up my day in the windtunnel (Natalia and Jessica Bender, among one or two others, will get that reference). I'm amused also that this all came about on the day I happened to only get 3 hours of sleep, but hey, who's counting?

My words to the wise for today: Wub your backplanes, and they'll wub you back (ahahaha, I'm so punny... I didn't get it until after I wrote it too, believe it or not... guess I really do need sleep).