Stupid heat wave. Stupid air conditioner that doesn’t work. Stupid RAID card. Stupid backup problems.
Not gonna be a fun day.
Tag: troubleshooting
I, I.T.
The best laid plans…
I arrived at work early today in order to do minor maintenance on a pair of servers. The plan was that it would be done by the time people started showing up at 9:00.
It’s 11:40, and I just finished.
Server A: Install latest patches and reboot. Problem: Server decided to hang on login. Solution: reboot again. Simple, but annoying.
Server B: Shut down, install RAM, reboot. Problem 1: Server would not take any of the new memory that, according to the manual (downloaded as a PDF from Dell), it should have accepted. Problem 2: After re-installing the old RAM, Microsoft Exchange refused to start, offering only a 10-digit error code as explanation. Solution: Lots of Google and MS Knowledge Base searches suggesting database problems turned out to be completely irrelevant upon finding another set of logs that mentioned a nonexistent drive F. Opened up the computer, reattached the loose SCSI cable, and everything ran fine.
Mirror Madness
Remember when the rear-view mirror in my car fell off? I picked up some appropriate glue that evening and stuck it back on, but what I didn’t realize until the next morning was that I hadn’t gotten it in exactly the right place. The driver’s-side sun visor would hit the corner of the mirror every time I moved it. So I grabbed a new tube of the adhesive, then put off actually removing and reattaching the mirror for a week and a half. (The mirror was in place, and I could aim it properly, I just had to be careful about moving the visor around.)
Today I decided I was finally going to fix it, so I pulled the mirror off the mounting button and tried to remove it from the windshield with a razor. No luck. I pulled out the package, looking for removal directions, and discovered that when they said “permanent,” they meant it. Directions for fixing a botched job were to mount a second button on top of the first.
So, back to the auto parts store looking for an extra button. It turns out they’re not standardized, so I have to get one for this particular mirror. Not likely to be at a generic auto parts store. And if I go to the Nissan dealer, it’ll probably cost as much as a new mirror. (Buying OEM parts is annoyingly expensive. I spent upwards of $40 for a replacement wheel cover because I wanted it to match the other three.) I did not want to buy a new mirror just because I glued the original one a quarter-inch out of place!
They did have a mounting arm on its own, so I went back out to see if my mirror would hook up to it. I pulled it off of the button, and noticed something about the arm: It had ball-and-socket joints at both ends.
Problem solved! I just swiveled the arm out to the right so that it clears the visor, and I can still position it correctly using the other socket.
Looopy!
Last week I spent every day rushing to get through various projects at work. (For various reasons, I’m trying to catch up on a bunch of back-burner projects, including some server upgrades/replacements.)Twice I had servers crash in the evening. Monday afternoon I started upgrading one system, figuring I could stay a bit late and finish it while alenxa was in class. It didn’t quite work out that way. The upgrade took longer than expected, Katie’s class got out earlier, and most of the critical services stopped working partway though. I ended up leaving to pick her up, grabbed Taco Bell, dropped her off at home, and came back… and was stuck at work until 10:00 while I got things running again.
The big project for the rest of the week was getting a new mail server set up. We’d been planning this for a while, as the previous server was kind of flaky, but it looked like it was heading for a serious meltdown. Not surprisingly, it took until Friday afternoon before it was ready to take over. There’s an old adage about not makng major changes before leaving for a vacation or holiday weekend. I decided that the old box was so close to meltdown that it would be worth the effort. Silly me… Once again it not only took longer than expected to move the mail over, but I got stuck again when I accidentally rebooted the wrong server and it wouldn’t come up again. Katie’s already told that story. I still ended up making more changes after we got home, and doing troubleshooting for the next two days.
So after a week of high-stress running around and not enough sleep, my immune system must have been trashed, because I started noticing a sore throat Friday evening. On Saturday it turned into congestion and a cough, on Sunday my voice dropped steadily to a low croak, and on Monday I could barely speak at all. Katie picked it up from me on Sunday, and we both ended up staying home yesterday. I spent most of the day either in bed or on the couch, and I drank a ton of orange juice/Sprite blend (because after a while, I couldn’t bring myself to drink straight orange juice, but I was tired of just water).
We did at least get to see the local fireworks display on Monday, even if half of me wanted to just stay home and lie down.
We’re both back at work today, but I’m not entirely sure I should be. I had a very mild fever yesterday — less than half a degree — but I still feel really loopy today. I’m sure waking up at 3:30 am and not being able to get to sleep again until 5:00 didn’t help, but overall I probably ended up getting as much sleep as I usually do. The last NyQuil has long since worn off, and DayQuil has never caused me problems.
As far as I know there are no driving-while-feverish statutes, though I hope I’ll be in better shape by the time I’m ready to go home.
Fighting fatigue and frustration
I’m the only one here today. I at least thought my boss was coming in, but I haven’t seen him yet. Still, he keeps odd hours, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he showed up at 3:00 and stayed into the evening.
Busy trying to get a new mail server set up. Using Mandrake instead of Red Hat due to driver issues. And while things that are built in work great, things that I’ve had to configure manually have been problematic. Right now I’m fighting a PAM/LDAP bug that I hope is limited to SSH, or else the server’s going to be unusable for any sort of authentication. Beginning to wonder whether it will be ready before the current server melts down under the load.
Staying up way too late. I was the first one in this morning, and started some coffee, figuring I’d need more than the one travel mug from home. Didn’t go back for a while. Co-worker showed up a bit later: “Did you make coffee this morning?” “Uh, yeah.” “Did you get enough sleep last night?” “Uh, no… why?” I ran through my memory of the morning and while I could remember getting the filter, the filter basket, and the coffee grounds, and I could remember turning the coffee maker on, I couldn’t actually remember putting the coffee pot under the spout. Guess why.
On Monday, the uberboss talked with me, my boss, and two other co-workers about a reorganization plan. It’s a bit complicated, and involves the fact that someone from a copmany we do development for is coming out to work with us on-site for 8 months, but basically I need to pick up skills I haven’t used in about 7 years instead of doing (a) what I’m good at and (b) what they hired me for. So I’m trying to take care of various back-burner projects before I have to focus on programming.
One of those back-burner projects was a server upgrade that went wrong and kept me at work until 10pm on Monday, and took up a big chunk of Tuesday morning trying to resolve the remaining issues. I’ve still got one web project I need to finish, and just picked up a new one. And there’s the melting mail server. And we’re coming up on a 3-day weekend of which two days are already planned with various sets of relatives. Vacation? Yeah, right!
Finally finished the fragging defrag!
Two hours later…
Morning – what’s so good about it?
Insufficient sleep.
30 minutes to drive the 7.5 miles to work. The 405 was so bad I decided to take University to Alton, which would have been fine except for the construction on University, where they stopped all traffic one car ahead of me so that construction workers could run a cable diagonally across the intersection, then hand it to a guy in a crane who lifted it up to the top of the opposite pole, at which point they all started pulling to raise it above the level of traffic. Which was at least interesting, even if it did slow down my commute.
So I arrive at work, and the monitor on my desk is showing not the blackness of a sleeping video display, but a blue screen starting out “STOP 0x00000a”. Yeah, just the way I want to start my morning, fixing my computer. It at least booted afterward, but it apparently didn’t get very far in the defragmenting I started before I left last night. For all I know the defragmenting caused it.
Fortunately I have two computers at my desk, so I can work on server admin stuff on the Linux box while the Windows box defrags. Or tries to.
Venting
Remember, when youâre tempted to say, âGreat, now what?â — DONâT!
After watching the very intense Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, we came home, I flopped on the bed, and thought, âIâm tempted to stay here.â But no, I wanted to post a brief, spoiler-free review. Heh, heh, heh.
(Feel free to ignore this post — I just need to vent somewhere.)
The annoying one
The annoying commenter is back with more tech support questions. alenxa convinced me I should be more diplomatic in my response, which is probably the right way to go. But Iâve saved the reply I wanted to make, just for its high snark content.
For the record, I donât mind high-volume commenters if theyâre on topic (like Kizi, for instance, who was only really high-volume while catching up on back posts and has settled into a regular-reader-and-commenter mode). I donât even mind topic drift, but it really annoys me when someone tries to hijack a topic.
Maybe itâs just that I hate doing tech support, particularly when I canât sit down at the computer and try to figure things out. Itâs about 20% knowledge, 30% research skills, and 50% intuition â and that intuition only works if I can mess around with the computer in question. And I do more than enough tech support at work.
Yeesh.
Around 10:00, one of my co-workers asked me about an error message he was seeing every time he booted Windows. It looked related to yesterday’s JPEG security fix (yes, you can now get hacked/infected/etc. just by looking at an image using Microsoft software), so I went to Windows Update.
And then the pop-up ads started. There should not be any advertisements on Windows Update. Clearly something was wrong.
I spent the next 1½ hours removing adware from his computer. Even after removing the obvious bits through the control panel (some of which left pieces behind), Norton found 21 different pieces of adware, including a program whose sole purpose is to surreptitiously download and install new adware while no-one’s looking, and several programs that claim to block pop-ups, but actually generate them.