Sheep Guarding Llama

SGL is still down today. This is our longest outage in as long as I can remember. Sorry that everyone can’t get in to check out all of the SGL awesomeness these last few days. I know that it makes for a long weekend. 🙂

I had a busy morning this morning and didn’t end up actually driving into the office until around one in the afternoon! I worked until almost seven though and I worked from home all morning so it wasn’t like I didn’t get anything done.

Dad went over to the house in Geneseo and did some more work attempting to get the SGL server back online. He called me at the office and gave me as much detail as he could about what was wrong but it turned out to be pretty major. We kicked around some ideas for getting it fixed including having him pack up the equipment and shipping it to me in Newark but the final decision was that I would just drive back to Geneseo after work tonight to deal with it myself.

I left work a little before seven and ran east out to Newark so that I could get supplies and a car load of stuff to go to Geneseo. Had I known that I was going to go to Geneseo tonight it would have saved at least an hour of driving.

Dominica got home and packed up as much as she could for me. Then she ran over to Food for Life and grabbed us some dinner. I pulled down Commerce Drive just in time to pick her up with the food. We ate and packed the car as quickly as possible and then I headed up US 280 to get up to New York.

The drive took five hours and it was around one in the morning when I arrived in Geneseo. I unpacked just what I absolutely needed for the night and then headed to the server room to work. I worked for three hours and finally SGL was back online. I have no idea how it happened but one of the drive enclosures on our main data storage array had shorted out and was sending garbage back to the RAID controller. Somewhat difficult to troubleshoot. But at least I managed to go to bed knowing that everything was up and running again. That is the worst – having to get sleep knowing that things are down and that in the morning you HAVE to get it working.

Dad is planning on coming over to meet me for breakfast in the morning at the Omega.

I was so exhausted that I ended up sleeping in until about ten o’clock this morning! Boy did I ever need that. I felt much better after getting an extreme night’s sleep. Oreo really appreciated the rest as well. He had doggie daycare all week and now his normal restful weekend is being spent with a small pug with loads of energy and no idea of when to take a break so Oreo is getting more and more tired.

We all just hung out at the house in Arnold for several hours before loading up the car and driving back up to Newark. The drive was much better tonight. It wasn’t raining and traffic was much lighter. It only took us four hours to get home.

This morning there was a wind storm in Geneseo and a tree came down cutting power to the SGL datacenter there. When power was restored SGL did not come back online. Dad tried some stuff today but was unsuccessful at bringing the server back up.

The drive down to Maryland last night was pretty crappy. Traffic was really heavy even as we left Newark and it started to rain before we had even pulled away from the curb at our building. Every time that I have had to drive anywhere for the past eight months it has been raining. It is driving me crazy.

We were in slow moving bumper to bumper traffic for hours. All the way through New Jersey it was awful. It wasn’t until we were in Delaware that we were able to get up any speed and traffic was still terrible there. The highway was moving so slowly that we decided that it had to be faster to take the shorter “local” router down Maryland’s Rt 301. That worked out well at route 301 was actually moving faster than the highway way.

As always driving the 330 my sciatica was horrible by the third hour or so of the drive. The pain is extreme and I can barely keep driving. The seat in the BMW hits me in just such a way that nothing I do makes it stop. Dominica was going to take over driving but she got a shoulder cramp just as I needed her to take over and I ended up having to drive the whole way.

It was late but not too late when we pulled into Stonington in Arnold, MD. Michelle and Frankie had all ready gone to bed but John was up waiting for us with Buddy their three year old pug that we had not yet met. The three of us stayed up for several hours just hanging out in the living room while Oreo and Buddy played. Oreo ended up peeing all over the place trying to establish dominance. What a pain!

It was almost two in the morning by the time we headed up to the guest quarters to get some sleep. This is our first time getting to stay in the guest suite at the Nicklins’ because last time the house was full from the Christmas party and we were the last to arrive and didn’t get dibs. This year we have made our reservations for the Christmas party well in advance and will be getting the guest suite. That is the weekend of December 9th. We will be in Maryland for that entire weekend.

John got us up at a little after seven this morning so that we could help him take his Corvette into the shop. Dominica wasn’t going to go with us but Michelle and her sister had gone to a fashion show and Dominica was going to be alone with the dogs until we got back and we were going to get breakfast so she decided to come along. Good thing that she did because the Corvette shop was in Gaithersburg, MD over fifty miles away to the northwest of Washington. That was well over two hours of total driving. We left Arnold around eight and got breakfast at the Annapolis Double T Diner on the way back and got back to the house after noon.

We spent the rest of the day just hanging out in Arnold. It was nice to get a chance to just visit and relax. Michelle cooked us dinner and John and I ran out and did a little shopping at Blockbuster like we often do when we are down there.

It was well after one in the morning when we got to bed. I have only had a few hours of sleep every day for the past several days and I am really exhausted.