The glamorous life of a sysadmin

The middle of the day was mostly spent trying to recover from a server crash. In theory, the fix was simple: Boot to the recovery console, then run chkdsk. Of course, that meant getting the right CD to run the recovery console for that version of Windows, waiting for it to boot, finding chkdsk (or rather a utility that chkdsk depends on, which the console couldn’t find on its own)… and then waiting for it to examine the entire RAID array (a process which took up most of the time).

All together, that “simple fix” took about 3.5 hours, during which we set up the higher-profile sites on a backup server (a process that also took longer than it should have, for other reasons).

Periodically I would walk out of the server room to answer email, run downstairs to grab lunch, or run back to my desk to eat a few bites of that lunch.