December 6, 2006: A Day with No SGL

That’s right. There was no Sheep Guarding Llama today. The site went down around four this morning due to one of the hard drives in the main RAID array that holds the site failing. The drive itself appears to be okay but the drive enclosure actually appears to have a problem. Not really sure yet. I won’t be able to do thorough investigation until closer to Christmas. But at least the site is back now.

I discovered that the site was down early in the morning and alerted dad who went over to the Geneseo data centre early late in the morning to see if the problem was obvious. (The last time that this happened we managed to keep going by pulling and reinstalling hard drives until they connected and started working again.) But after an hour or so of trying he was not able to get anywhere and we decided to give up. We had no idea at this point how we were going to deal with the issue and the most likely thing seemed like we would ship the server to Newark and that I would deal with it down here. (What a PAIN that would be.)

I immediately got off my butt and ordered all of the parts necessary to get four additional servers installed into the new Scranton Data Center, though, so that we could begin the process of clearing that server ASAP. I hope that the parts will arrive promptly in Newark and that I might be able to install one or more servers in Scranton next week. This will be our first production deployment to Scranton. We have had a test server there now for about two or three months.

I headed into the office after grabbing a bite at Food for Life. The weather has turned cold and there is a significant chill in the air. I guess our nice, warm New Jersey autumn is officially over now.

Overall it was a slow day. Much slower than I would have guessed that it would be. I had some after hours work to do tonight and had to stay in the office until around half past six which was not very late at all and I was very happy that everything had gone quite quickly. I decided that I was feeling good and since tomorrow was all ready going to be my work from home day that it just made sense for me to run to Geneseo tonight. A pain, yes. But the best of any possible solution that we were able to come up with.

I got home a little after seven and Dominica and I packed up the car as quickly as we could. We decided that Oreo should go to Geneseo with me since otherwise he would have to go to doggy daycare tomorrow and that would make for a five day week which totally exhausts him AND he has to stay there all weekend since Dominica and I are going to the Nicklin’s in Maryland and there won’t be any space for him so it would end up being closer to eleven straight days at daycare with several of those days him not even getting to come home in the evenings!

So around eight at night Oreo and I set out for Geneseo. Traffic was light and the drive went quickly. We made good time. I grabbed McDonalds at Great Bend, PA for my dinner and we were in Geneseo before one in the morning.

I worked for about three hours getting the server back up and running. It was no small task. I was totally exhausted by the time that I was done. What a relief it is to have the site and all of the other server functions back online. It was a large server with a lot of stuff running on it. It wouldn’t have been the end of the world but it would not have been a happy situation had it really gone down permanently. But now we know that it demise is imminent and it needs to be decommissioned sooner than later so that work will begin after this weekend’s trip to Maryland.

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