Wednesday 31 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, what can I say? Last night was way more eventful than I wanted!

The plan was simple. Wait until just before home time. Shut down the server. Move some connections. Start an online RAID rebuild. Go home. This bears little relation to what actually happened.

As required by our disaster recovery test plan, I had removed a disk from the RAID array and put in a new blank one to demonstrate that the array will rebuild itself. No problems there! But then I went to put the old disk back into the array… but for reasons beyond my comprehension, the RAID controller fails to detect that this isn’t the same drive, and attempts to try and use the thing. This results in general chaos all round, since obviously the data is similar yet wildly out of sync.

There appears to be no way of convincing the RAID controller to not use the out of date information on this drive. It’s really frustrating — putting in a completely blank drive works fine, but putting in a drive that’s been part of the array before causes the whole thing to horribly malfunction!

God damn it! Anybody know how to erase a SCSI harddrive? (Without connecting it to a SCSI controller, that is…)

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Monday 29 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Another day, another server in pieces on the server room floor for no really good reason. Damn this testing stuff is scary!

Still, whatever doubt there was about the RAID controller accepting a replacement drive that’s the wrong size seems to have been extinguished. The RAID set is rebuilding quite happily as we speak.

Damn that alarm is loud though! I almost went deaf waiting for the server to boot up so I could silence the alarm… Still, beats the hell out of the Windoze software RAID stuff, which gives you no kind of notification at all that there’s even a problem. (When I first joined the company, we discovered that the software RAID set on one server had been in a “degraded” state for over 2 years and nobody had noticed!)

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Friday 26 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

I hate writing reports.

Have you ever found yourself really really wanting to insert flippant remarks into one?

From a technical perspective, this simply involves moving all our existing equipment to its new location. However, in order to demonstrate that it still malfunctions as badly as it does at present, we will of course have to perform an exhaustive and unnecessarily complex suite of tests. Since the system is deterministic and no system components or settings have changed, it is a trivial result that the system cannot possibly function in any way differently to how it functions at present. However, such logically rigorous arguments are insufficient to convince QA auditors, who demand absolute proof (despite the ultimate scientific impossibility of any such proof). This unnecessary testing activity is expected to take several months to complete, and presumably cannot be started until the system has been fully installed and finalised in its new location. This creates a window of several months where we will not have access to a “fully tested” system with which to carry out business activities [while staying within regulatory compliance]. It is not known how this issue can be addressed.

Can you tell what my feelings on the matter are?

Hmm… I should probably take this paragraph out of my report though.

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Friday 26 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Scary, isn’t it?

I just got another threatening email because the disaster recovery testing isn’t complete yet.

Some background. Before I joined the company, our disaster recovery plan was 2 sheets of A4 that said virtually nothing. (”The administrator will decide on the best course of action and execute it in a timely manner.” Or a slight expansion of that.) There was no test plan at all. And never had been.

After I’d been here a while, I was given the joyous task of producing a proper recovery plan. It took forever, and the result was a 30-page procedure detailing just about every type of disaster that could happen, the precise impact this would have, and what options are available for resolution/recovery. Apparently, auditors love it. (And let’s face it, this document essentially exists to keep auditors happy. It’s not for our benefit or anything.)

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Thursday 25 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

In order to calm myself down, I went to lunch early and sat to read a comic. I found one entitled “Green Cleaning”. It was a hoot!

“The industry producing household cleaning products is poorly regulated, and innumerable deadly chemicals are contained in such products.” Mmm, nice unsubstantiated statement. The book them goes on to catalogue the “deadly neurotoxic chemicals” found in various types of cleaning products. (”Neurotoxin” sounds so much more scary than “toxin”, eh?) For example, did you know that spray cans of various types contain solvents which can kill you? Shocking, isn’t it?

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Thursday 25 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

I am now frustrated to the point of utter rage.

Year after year I’ve tried to get new PCs in here. And new we finally have some, and they don’t even ****ing work!!!

I’ve spent all week setting up the new machines. Each one is a brand new box, with a clean install of Windoze XP personally installed by myself. They are all immaculate. Mint condition. And yet, none of them will ****ing print!

Words cannot express the sheer fury I feel at this moment in time. I am so damn angry I can’t even describe it. I am just so utterly furious.

Why in the name of God will these machines not ****ing do as they are told!!!

I’m going to go lay down for a while now…

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Thursday 25 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Yesterday, the temperature outside was a bitter 3 °C. Yet the temperature inside when I arrived at work in the morning was an uncomfortable 24 °C. This is unprecedented; usually the heating is turned off over night, it’s utterly freezing in the morning, by midday the temperature is about right, and by about 2 PM it’s an oven. But yesterday, it was absurdly hot all day. (My thermometer hit 27 °C!)

Today looks like being another hot one. It’s 8 °C outside, and as I sit at my desk typing this, it’s already 26 °C. I’m dripping wet! And I haven’t been here 30 minutes yet…

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Wednesday 24 Oct 2007 by Orphi the AweKid.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ve gone too far.

For example, I wrote a program called Scavenger that scans users’ roaming profiles and automatically deletes useless temp files from them. (WTF #1: Why does this program need to exist in the first place?)

I have this program set to run twice a day on the server, but apparently that isn’t getting the job done. So I wanted to make the program run on the clients too. I tried scheduling it to run there twice a day, but that wasn’t enough. So my new plan is to just make Scavenger run on the clients and the server every 5 minutes. (The program takes only a few seconds to run when there’s nothing to actually delete.)

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