Sheep Guarding Llama

I didn’t get a ton of sleep last night but enough to get me by. Today is going to be a long day but this weekend is all relaxing, we hope, and should be a lot of fun. I am looking forward to the weekend.

Dominica left to take Oreo to daycare. If we manage to get back and pick him up by seven on Sunday evening then we will get to see him on Sunday otherwise we won’t have a chance to see him again until Monday night! That is a long time with our baby. This is his first time boarding at his daycare so we are hoping that he handles it well. He might get scared but since he goes there all during the week he will probably be okay. He loves being there.

SGL is still running today. Pheww. Backups will be very frequent from here on out. I haven’t heard about shipping times yet on the parts needed to go to Scranton but I am still hopeful that I will be able to be out there by the first half of next week even if I am only taking a single machine out there (but I really hope for as close to four as possible.)

My new half terabyte Samsung SATA hard drive arrived last night. Unfortunately I am too busy to have any chance of installing it until Sunday night at the very earliest. The drive is needed so that I can do video editing on Dominica’s computer because her current 80GB drive is totally taxed as it is. And a single MiniDV transferred onto the computer takes about 12GB of storage so you eat through storage very quickly.

Also waiting for me on Sunday night is SUSE 10.2. I am currently running my main desktop on 10.1 on 64bit and I am hoping to be able to upgrade to 10.2 right away. I am anxious to get to take it for a test spin.

My sinuses are really bothering me today. Maybe because I was in Geneseo yesterday. I haven’t figured out yet whether or not there is a connection. But these past few months have been really rough. The pain is really intense.

I managed to leave the office at four and run over to Men’s Warehouse to pick up my tuxedo and acutrements. That went very smoothly and I was able to run home from there and do my evening work from the apartment. Traffic was awful getting home and it took me forever. Dominica got home just minutes after I had arrived. While I did my evening work she did packing to get us ready to go. My work went pretty quickly and I was actually ready to go before Dominica was.

It was about half past seven when we finally got onto the road but that was pretty good because we were able to get dinner from Subway before leaving (while waiting for the car) and traffic was pretty light. In fact we almost never had to slow down for anyone. We made great time and were at John and Michelle’s house just after eleven in the evening. Early enough to be able to hang out for a little while with them and with John’s brother Adam who had arrived a few hours ahead of us.

I got to bed around four last night and had to be up at eight this morning so I was pretty tired. But I did managed to get roughly one sleep cycle in so I am not that bad but definitely tired. I checked this morning and the server is still running which is a major relief. Losing it at any moment is a real possibility at this point.

I checked in with the office and did some real quick tasks and called dad so that we could do breakfast. He came over about half an hour later and we headed over to the Omega. It is funny how much eating at the Omega is like being home. It is just a part of being in Geneseo.

I was not prepared for how cold it was going to be in Geneseo. I have gotten used to New Jersey all ready. It was bitter cold and it snowed almost the entire time that I was home. Dominica was taunting me with the knowledge that it was fifty degrees back in Newark and under twenty here!

It was more or less a normal “office day” for me working from home. Oreo just slept just about all day. Normal for him on Thursdays. I wasn’t too busy and got a little time to do a few tasks around the house but not too much. I did do some searching for some things that I really needed but did not succeed in finding much of anything. But I did get a tiny bit of cleaning done. The house in Geneseo is so weird. It is sterile much like a hotel. Very weird.

Dad came back over a little before five and we did a quick dinner at the Omega. We couldn’t linger long because I had to get back and wrap up my evening work so that I could get onto the road. It was eight or so by the time that I was able to leave Geneseo. That makes for a long night but not that bad. It took about five hours to get back to Newark so I arrived just after one in the morning. I felt pretty good. I wasn’t that tired even after a long drive in the terrible wind.

On the ride down I managed to finished listening to “Mayflower” which is a really long book. I found it very interesting though. There is so little that most people know about seventeenth century New England history. The famous dark century of America. Like it says at the end of the book, American school children are taught that the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock (no one actually knows for sure if they did – one old guy on his death bed claims that that is where they landed and hence the legend was born) and that they had Thanksgiving (which was made up by President Lincoln during the Civil War) and then that we fought for our freedom from the British (more than one hundred and fifty years later!) There is a lot of missing history between those two events. So much history, in fact, that the whole things makes little sense to children studying it. How does a small colony barely able to feed itself suddenly fend off the world’s biggest super-power? It was between the foundations of the Massachusetts, New Netherlands and Virginia colonies and 1770 that the building of our current country actually took place and there is a lot of important history in there including several wars such as King Philip’s War with the highest casualty rate of any war ever fought (that we know of) in America!

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.