December 1, 2009: Day at Dad’s

We were all quite thankful to wake up in New York this morning.  No more flying for a while.  It is very nice to be back and not having any vacation activities needing any of our attention.

I do have one big project today, that is a failed hard drive on a server here that needs to be replaced lickety split.  I found that the drive had failed on Friday while we were in Florida but there was nothing that could be done from there.  So I did all of the appropriate backups and did everything that I could to prepare for a complete failure and ordered another drive to be overnighted, which means that it arrived yesterday, so that today the drive could be replaced.

I am also back to my normal work schedule today so I am doing everything that I can to get caught up on anything that is pending or lingering from while I was out of town.  I was working the whole time but it is impossible to remain as focused and efficient when doing that and, at the very least, my email management has gotten sloppy and I am very much backed up on all of my email accounts.  So anyone who is waiting on emails from me, I have not likely forgotten you and will be getting back to you throughout this week as I start to get caught back up.

My Aunt Sharon and Uncle Leo came up today to spend some time with Liesl.  No one got to visit with me as I was stuck working, a lot.  But that is expected.

This evening was spent working on the failed hard drive.  It was a software RAID set that failed which means quite a bit more manual work to get everything back and ready for action. There is a lot of good learning to be done in times of failure like this so I actually had Dominica go through the software portion of the swapping process so she did that and then it was up to be to do the physical hardware change.

The server is actually mounted to a ceiling mount which is a little hard to deal with when you need to open it up and swap in and out drives.  Especially when they are not hot swap drives.  So I had to power the machine down, open it up, climb a ladder and do all of the swapping with my arm extended and being pretty much unable to see what I was doing.

To make matter worse, I swapped the wrong drive at first.  Argh.  There is no visible indicator on this type of box so it is just a chance that you take.  Not fun.  Once I got the drive physically replaced and checked out we were able to begin the rebuilding process.  I had Dominica do this piece as well, which only takes a few minuets.  Then it was time to wait.

The drive rebuild process took many hours and I was not able to start up all of the downed processes and systems to do a check out until around two in the morning.  I am sleepy but I am happy knowing that the drive has been replaced and there is nothing further to worry about from that machine.  That failed drive has been hanging over my head for five days now and that is not the kind of thing that you want to be worrying about.  So I am much happier now.

Our plan is to be packed up and on the road back to Peekskill tomorrow evening after work.  We are really dreading getting back to Peekskill.  Once we are there there is just so much work that we need to do 🙁

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