I got up yesterday morning a few minutes earlier than normal, and started at work around 8:30. Lesly and I drove to Geelong and joined Richard. We worked as normal until around 5pm when we then went out the back to the server room and began our “real” work day.

Over the course of the next five hours we decommissioned two servers, changed the role on another, comissioned two new servers into production (one replacing one of the old ones and taking the other’s role, and a brand new one), as well as implement a new Division-wide software package, backup schedule and regime and new web server.

Completely knackered and tired, Lesly drove us back to Melbourne — we picked up Justine on the way home from her big night out — and we arrived back at around 12:00. The day was almost over, but I had to check on yet another server that appeared to have died while we were in Geelong. Luckily it didn’t take long to revive it; it had actually been shut down by someone from Geelong so there was not really a problem.

So, my work day yesterday lasted around sixteen or so hours. Definitely one of the longest ones I’ve worked in ages. We did manage to do quite a lot in five of those hours, and they were the result of a lot of planning beforehand which made things a hell of a lot easier.

Just before leaving work I noticed that and LP of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was left on the table (someone recently brought in a large pile of LPs for people to take if they wished), so I grabbed it (not that I have anything on which to play it!). Shortly after we arrived home, I was in bed and asleep.

Just got back from work, where Lesly and I have just spent around 6 hours fiddling with a rack.

We had to install a Dell PowerEdge 2850 server and a Dell PowerVault 114T tape unit into the rack. Easy enough, right?

Unfortunately, due to the existing equipment in the rack, we also had to buy new, longer shelves, and move the vertical rails all the way to the back. This meant that we had to remove everything and setup the entire thing from scratch. Least we managed to make it much neater in there, even with the addition of another few cables.

We also installed an el cheapo non rack-mounted KVM switch which didn’t seem to like the trackball on our keyboard. Ah well, an optical mouse is now in there too.

What an enjoyable “long” weekend I’m having. A whole day off!

At work this evening, Glenn and I had to perform a few bits and pieces of “server maintenance”. We waited until most people had left, turned off the BDC and what followed was an almost Kafka-esque comedy of errors.

Part of the “maintenance” we wanted to perform was installing a new hard disk into a server. This server, a Dell PowerEdge something-or-other cost more than $10,000 three years ago. The server is all-SCSI, two CPUs, three power supplies (for redundancy) and about eight SCSI hard disks. Since all the hard disk bays are taken, we thought it might be fun to try and see what happened when we installed an IDE hard disk (just for backups, not really a production-use disk).

Well, first of all, it didn’t fit. Dell has devised a form factor which requires you to buy adapters from them if you actually want to add any extra, special hardware. Not to be beaten at this stage of the game, we poked and prodded, added a hard disk mounting bracket (which was too small, but could be made to sit securely in the space) and started installing the IDE controller card. This small setback would have been too simple. Next, the IDE cable wouldn’t reach, since this server is so long (deep). We managed to find an older one which did reach, but it severly reduces the hard disk’s speed from ATA-133 to ATA-33. Oh well, let’s try it anyway!

Now, the server won’t boot! What?! The server was looking for boot information on the (unformatted) IDE hard disk. Well, let’s tell it to search for the SCSI first. Nice and easy. Except that this doesn’t work.

We decide to abandon this since we’ve already spent over 1.5-2 hours trying to get this up and running. Mental note for the future: “It ain’t gonna work!” Next thing is to put a new server into the server rack, and get it up and running. No sweat, I’ve already installed this server, attached it to the domain and it’s got all it needs installed.

Hey, wouldn’t it be great if this new server could use the hard disk, since the older server won’t? So, I connect it. The new server does detect it, but since it’s older hardware doesn’t know what to do. Oh great. I limit the hard disk from 120GB to 32GB which allows the BIOS to find it, and boot.

We’re on our way, great! Now, since the new server was given to some people to install software on has returned, it won’t behave on the domain as it should. It can’t see other computers outside of our domain. Ugh, great…

So, long story made a little shorter, we muck around for another hour trying to get this server running, but it won’t behave. Tired, and a bit flustered we decide that “near enough is good enough” and both leave for the night.

The BDC is at least working, and the new server sort of works… Near enough.

I think I can now consider myself part of the “Dodgy Bros” computer fraternity. There have been times I’ve had to pull a computer apart and take it out of the case just to diagnose a fault, which is always quite enjoyable.

Over the last couple of minutes I’ve been trying to think up some dodgy stuff I’ve done, computing-wise.

One thing I can think up is the time I accidentally clicked “apply to all subdirectories” while on one of our work’s NT4 servers. In this instance, I was applying permissions changes across an entire section of our corporate data drive. This accidental click prevented people from accessing stuff for a few days, while I feverishly restored all files from a backup, exported the permissions to a file and copied those permissions over the current data (which seems to sound a lot easier than it actually was).

I can’t really think of too many more, which is a bit sad. The reason I’m writing this topic though, is to announce my pleasure of “doing a dodgy” yesterday with a hard disk. While trying to backup all important data from this hard disk (so it could be formatted), I managed to flick the jumper (which designates the drive as a master, slave, etc) and couldn’t find it among all the other crap on my desk. There is, by the way, an awful lot of crap on my desk. After about an hour of searching, I decided to try my hand at some dodginess.

I rifled through one of the vans belonging to an electrician who works for us. I found some wire made up of many strands of which I grabbed one. I twisted the strands around two pins and link them together and perform the same function as the jumper.

To my surprise it actually worked. I had expected that it would work, since that’s basically what the jumper does. However, I’d expected some sort of side-effect, like smoke, fire, explosions, sparks or something similarly exciting.

And now I’m pulling keys off a keyboard to see if I can fix that. Given the way that everything here is normally chucked out if it’s not easily fixable, I’m having a bit of fun anyway.

The old axiom “Loose lips sink ships”, and others like it (i.e. “Be careful what you say, you never know who’s listening”) seem to be accurate still today.

Today at work I advised my boss, Glenn, that an entire directory (”folder”, for those of you who have been using Windows for too long) had been mysteriously deleted from our web server.

A few minutes earlier, I’d had a call from one of the people whose service that particular area of our website advertises. She was in a bit of a flutter as she didn’t know what had been going on.

I managed to restore the directory quite easily and even found who had removed it (actually, they’d decided to ZIP the whole directory but “moved” the files instead of “copying”).

Right, so I let Glenn know about it, and he sends me an Instant Message asking if he’d accidentally done it (he’s not too familiar with Dreamweaver, and when he started using it had accidentally overwritten some older versions of files). Before I could answer, Glenn disappeared from the Instant Message client (AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM) list.

Hang on, the title will make sense soon.

So I continue on with other work; a couple of hours later, Glenn appears back on AIM. I decide to tell Glenn he hadn’t stuffed up, and that it wasn’t even someone in our department. So, I write the Instant Message, and a few seconds later he sends me a message saying “oops, 500 people just saw that message; I’m presenting something at Melbourne Uni”.

D’oh!

Check out the huge amount of cash I spent! Oh yeah! Take into allowance the exchange rate though. Must be, oh, $0.08 or so.