I was awaken this morning by Liesl just after seven. That gave me about five hours of sleep. The most that I can really hope for these days. Oreo was in a “I need my daddy” mood all day yesterday and he slept between my legs this morning so I couldn’t move and was stuck waiting for him to wake up so that I could get up which always hurts my back.
I was thinking that today was going to be a nice, relaxing day other than the drive home tonight. No such luck. I logged into the office just to make sure that everything was okay since it is a Sunday and very few people work on Sunday so things can easily get missed if no one checks in and I discovered that we had quite a few machines down. Oh boy.
So I started working at noon. It took a bit of testing before we realized that the commonality between all of the machines that were not working were that they all ran SAN and that they were all involved in receiving one particular patch from the engineering department that updated the kernel. So, from that, we were able to rather that the chances were that, like they often do, the engineers failed to take into consideration the SAN software stack and had broken it again. This is a never ending problem that we had with them.
The work ended up just going for hours and hours. First we had to do a ton of troubleshooting. That took a few hours because it was not very apparently what had happened. By the end of the day there were five us working on the problem.
I worked on that issue until after six (yes, for over six hours) and then, after just a few minutes break, was called out to deal with another issue for another team. I ended up being “at work” from noon until seven. What an exhausting day. Things were not even completely done when I left and some work just had to be saved until tomorrow. Dominica and I really could not wait any longer to get onto the road. Our plan had been to leave Frankfort between three and four in the afternoon and we completely missed that window.
So it was around seven thirty in the evening when we finally got into the car and drove out of Frankfort. We are taking the opportunity to go to Scranton and pick up two servers while we are making this trip. That meant that we got to take the really nice drive south out of Frankfort and skip the highway pretty much altogether. I love the southerly drive out of Frankfort. That part of New York is so gorgeous. It really reminds me of rural England.
We got down to Scranton around a quarter after ten. Dominica waited in the car with Liesl and Oreo while I went into the datacenter and helped as we unracked two servers, a DL145 G2 and a DL360 G1. The DL360 G1 is old and going to be going to Castile Christian Academy. The DL145 G2 is going to be repurposed as a dedicated backup server running Red Hat Linux and the Amanda backup server.
It was a really good thing that we went to Scranton today, even though it was a bit of a pain to do one more thing today. One of the two machines that is staying in Scranton for a few more weeks had a failed hard drive that I was able to swap out while I was there. Only took a minute to fix but would have been quite the disaster later on.
Our plan is to be completely done with Scranton in just a few weeks. Then I will make one last special trip up there to pick up what remains and that will be that. I will be very happy when that is all over and done.
It takes about two hours to get back to Peekskill from Scranton. Less than, but almost, two hours. We had to make one doggy pit stop along the way. He tried to be fast.
So it was just around one in the morning when we rolled into Peekskill. We were very glad to be home. Dominica tried to go right to bed but Liesl’s schedule was all messed up and she was having problems falling asleep. I went down and checked on the DVD conversion processes running in the basement. They were still running and had a lot of work left to do. I guess that I did a good job loading them up before we left. My main desktop will still be working for another few days before it completes the work that I left for it!
I did some calculations and my desktop would need to run continuously for about four years in order to convert everything that we have! Four years of non-stop work. And that is if I was able to keep it running all of that time and able to keep it completely loaded up with prepped work. This is no small project! I can’t wait until we have some local server capacity to help offload some of this work.
We tried going to bed at two but Liesl woke right up and was not about to go back to sleep. Dominica was really frustrated and unhappy so I got up and stayed up with Liesl until almost three when she finally fell asleep. This weekend has been way too exhausting for me.
It appears that the Arizona Game and Fish Department has conspired to exterminate the last of the American Jaguar population from the country.