Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

8/8/2001

Baton Rouge

Filed under: On The Road — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is in the early morning or 7:00 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waning Gibbous

*sigh* Here I sit, tired to exhaustion, waiting for the weather to clear in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. How did I end up here? *sigh* Oh, my what a story. I’ll keep it short, though. Once again, I’m paying for someone else’s short-sightedness. The beat-up, old hardware in our Baton Rouge office curled up its toes and died yesterday afternoon. Or, at least part of it did. And, since we couldn’t quite seem to get it up and running remotely, I was “volunteered” to go fix it.
Okay, that’s not quite true. After the last mess I dealt with due to crappy hardware, I felt that if I didn’t go, it might cost me my job. Also, as much as I like my employees, the last time I sent someone else to do this kind of work, I was blamed because they couldn’t make the old, crappy hardware work. So, I decided that if I were going to take the blame anyway, I might as well do the work, too.
What that meant, however, was loading up the car with server equipment and driving over 300 miles to Baton Rouge at 9:00pm at night. That’s roughly a four to five hour trip to a place I’ve never been at night when I was already tired. I only had one near miss. And that wasn’t my fault. That was the two drunk kids in the Saturn outside of Beaumont that came off an entrance ramp and across three lanes of traffic without looking. I don’t think I actually was on two tires at any point, but only because I had the extra weight of the server equipment.
Anyway, I did manage to get a couple hours of sleep before I came in to rescue the server. After I blew the dust off the SCSI ID settings on the external Artecon drive arrays, I spotted the trouble pretty quickly. So, I swapped out the bad tape drive that started all this and got them up and running. That was about 9:45am this morning. My next task is to get a set of mirror drives put together for them and get them into place. That’s why I’m waiting for the weather to clear, so I can get out to my car to get the hardware I need. Then maybe my captors, er… fellow employees, will let me sleep. Probably not. *sigh* More updates later…. Or maybe tomorrow after I drive back.

ilovemyjobilovemyjobilovemyjob……


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