Wednesday...

So I was supposed to go to this supplier roadshow in the Four Seasons Hotel this morning, but several team members had also expressed an interest so, as it was closer to their areas of expertise than mine, I elected to take a raincheck and hold down the fort with Ciaran and Tony.

In truth, I didn't mind - it meant I didn't have to be up and out at 7:30am, something I hate.

So I strolled into work at my usual 9:15, into the mouth of chaos.

The server that screens incoming mail threw a disk; fortunately it was in a mirror set which meant digging out a spare and swapping it in. No big deal.

Tony took care of it while Ciaran and I tried to work out why the server that manages the SAN appliance in my DataCentre was no longer responding to outside control.

There didn't appear to be anything wrong - all the lights were green, there was network traffic apparently going through it, but d'you think we could log on?

Nope.

In a case like that I'd simply push the button to power it off, then boot it back up again, however I had a question regarding the underlying resource management, so I decided to wait for expert advice. Better that than take a chance and be wrong, which happened to a colleague earlier this year (see below).

Turned out pushing the button was the thing to do.

So I did.

I was returning from a coffee break when I spotted Alison from application support coming down the hall with Tony. Now, usually when someone from one of the apps needs something, they phone or email. If they show up at your desk, something's up.

Or in this case, down.

The Customer Services system had, it seemed, taken a senior moment and gone to sleep. Again.

This is the self-same application to which I referred above, and the best way I can find to describe it is to quote (albeit very loosely) from Terry Pratchett:

"You know the way some people have one leg shorter than the other?"
"Yes?"
"'Cos, with me, see, it's that - "
"Don't tell me; both legs are shorter than the other?"
"Yeah..."

Fortunately, in this instance Alison and Tony recalled how the application had been rescued last time, and got it up and stumbling again in short order.

And it still wasn't lunchtime.

And then it was...

After lunch, there was a team meeting to bring us up to speed with departmental strategy for the next few months and close off old items. Scheduled for an hour, it took 90 minutes, but that was okay.

The rest of the day was spent sorting through license keys and emails trying to find more information for my supplier, who appears to be having trouble telling the difference between 21 and 18 (and the regular reader will know that I don't mean this in an age-related context).

I left at 6:30pm, my MP3 trying to play something from the Mission: Impossible III soundtrack, bought the office syndicate's lottery tickets (which didn't win anything) and came home.

Another day, done...

Oh, yeah - meant to say, that patch update yesterday worked - no more backup issues...