My morning at work today started out fairly normal. All of our T1 circuits for our various Madison area offices on our WAN had been successfully re-routed to our corporate office instead of routing to our West Towne office and out to the Internet from there. This was nice, because now we can centrally locate our Cisco PIX firewalls, Barracuda Spyware firewall, and DNS servers at our corporate office - saving a drive out to the west side if problems arise. Surprisingly, everything went well with the exception of a handful of calls from users who had not switched from our old mail server address prior to our upgraded mail servers were installed over a year ago since DNS had changed and the server at corporate didn’t have a record for the old server address pointing to the new. This was great, potential headache of the day (weekend?) had been averted.

Shortly after the successful transition, a call comes in from our Janesville office where file and print services had been down all morning. The receptionist described a loud noise coming from the server, after listening to it - it sounded like a failed drive. Off to one of our vendors to cobble together a temporary server while a permanent replacement could be ordered. The first shot at getting the temporary server up and running was a failure. The machine posted just fine, but exhibited issues after the OS install which turned out to be a failed motherboard. Back to the drawing board once again, this time unfortunately the same motherboard was not available from our vendor, so we had to settle for a different board and another clean install of the OS. This was some 2.5-3 hours later and by this point, our Janesville office agents had transitioned into the less than happy zone.

The server is finally up and running, at least enough to get it loaded up along with the rest of my equipment and head down to Janesville. I am immediately greeted by an eager agent who presumed this would be a simple plug and play operation - they were wrong. I generally don’t mind others watching me do my work or asking me questions while I’m working - but when you have a fair amount of work to do (recover data, setup users, and other various tasks) along with an atmosphere where the users are getting exceptionally annoyed that they are not able to print changes my mindset significantly. I was asked several times from several various people if it was up and running, when it would be working, what are you doing, can you look at this problem quick, as well as having one person hover over my shoulder for a fair while. I understand it is a Friday and you have to print out material for your upcoming weekend showings, which was bound to be plentiful with the nice weather we were having, but if you want this fixed as quick as possible - give me my space and leave me alone.

The rest of my visit was uninteruptted with the exception of a couple agents randomly shouting out a “BOY IT WOULD SURE BE NICE IF WE COULD PRINT!” comment that if anything only stimulated my desire to slow down and take longer - but it was creeping up closer to 5PM and I had to get back in time to pickup Declan so I continued normally. My original plan was to go in and attempt to image the old hard drive, which would prove to be a success as the noise I heard over the phone was not a failing drive, but a failing loud fan in the power supply causing the machine to overheat and seize. I imaged the drive, copied it to the temporary server. The next phase of the plan was to convert the Acronis image to a virtual machine with VMware Converter so I could run a virtual machine on top of the host OS using VMware server, saving me from the task of reconfiguring each of the users, file, and printer shares. This of course had to fail, VMware would not convert the image as it has done many times prior without incident. Disappointed, I began the task of recreating everything from scratch and went on my way home, ending the day where nothing went well.

Categories: Mike's Work