Tag: work

Looopy!

Last week I spent every day rushing to get through various projects at work. (For various reasons, I’m trying to catch up on a bunch of back-burner projects, including some server upgrades/replacements.)Twice I had servers crash in the evening. Monday afternoon I started upgrading one system, figuring I could stay a bit late and finish it while alenxa was in class. It didn’t quite work out that way. The upgrade took longer than expected, Katie’s class got out earlier, and most of the critical services stopped working partway though. I ended up leaving to pick her up, grabbed Taco Bell, dropped her off at home, and came back… and was stuck at work until 10:00 while I got things running again.

The big project for the rest of the week was getting a new mail server set up. We’d been planning this for a while, as the previous server was kind of flaky, but it looked like it was heading for a serious meltdown. Not surprisingly, it took until Friday afternoon before it was ready to take over. There’s an old adage about not makng major changes before leaving for a vacation or holiday weekend. I decided that the old box was so close to meltdown that it would be worth the effort. Silly me… Once again it not only took longer than expected to move the mail over, but I got stuck again when I accidentally rebooted the wrong server and it wouldn’t come up again. Katie’s already told that story. I still ended up making more changes after we got home, and doing troubleshooting for the next two days.

So after a week of high-stress running around and not enough sleep, my immune system must have been trashed, because I started noticing a sore throat Friday evening. On Saturday it turned into congestion and a cough, on Sunday my voice dropped steadily to a low croak, and on Monday I could barely speak at all. Katie picked it up from me on Sunday, and we both ended up staying home yesterday. I spent most of the day either in bed or on the couch, and I drank a ton of orange juice/Sprite blend (because after a while, I couldn’t bring myself to drink straight orange juice, but I was tired of just water).

We did at least get to see the local fireworks display on Monday, even if half of me wanted to just stay home and lie down.

We’re both back at work today, but I’m not entirely sure I should be. I had a very mild fever yesterday — less than half a degree — but I still feel really loopy today. I’m sure waking up at 3:30 am and not being able to get to sleep again until 5:00 didn’t help, but overall I probably ended up getting as much sleep as I usually do. The last NyQuil has long since worn off, and DayQuil has never caused me problems.

As far as I know there are no driving-while-feverish statutes, though I hope I’ll be in better shape by the time I’m ready to go home.

Current Mood: 🤒sick

Fighting fatigue and frustration

I’m the only one here today. I at least thought my boss was coming in, but I haven’t seen him yet. Still, he keeps odd hours, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he showed up at 3:00 and stayed into the evening.

Busy trying to get a new mail server set up. Using Mandrake instead of Red Hat due to driver issues. And while things that are built in work great, things that I’ve had to configure manually have been problematic. Right now I’m fighting a PAM/LDAP bug that I hope is limited to SSH, or else the server’s going to be unusable for any sort of authentication. Beginning to wonder whether it will be ready before the current server melts down under the load.

Staying up way too late. I was the first one in this morning, and started some coffee, figuring I’d need more than the one travel mug from home. Didn’t go back for a while. Co-worker showed up a bit later: “Did you make coffee this morning?” “Uh, yeah.” “Did you get enough sleep last night?” “Uh, no… why?” I ran through my memory of the morning and while I could remember getting the filter, the filter basket, and the coffee grounds, and I could remember turning the coffee maker on, I couldn’t actually remember putting the coffee pot under the spout. Guess why.

On Monday, the uberboss talked with me, my boss, and two other co-workers about a reorganization plan. It’s a bit complicated, and involves the fact that someone from a copmany we do development for is coming out to work with us on-site for 8 months, but basically I need to pick up skills I haven’t used in about 7 years instead of doing (a) what I’m good at and (b) what they hired me for. So I’m trying to take care of various back-burner projects before I have to focus on programming.

One of those back-burner projects was a server upgrade that went wrong and kept me at work until 10pm on Monday, and took up a big chunk of Tuesday morning trying to resolve the remaining issues. I’ve still got one web project I need to finish, and just picked up a new one. And there’s the melting mail server. And we’re coming up on a 3-day weekend of which two days are already planned with various sets of relatives. Vacation? Yeah, right!

Yeesh.

Around 10:00, one of my co-workers asked me about an error message he was seeing every time he booted Windows. It looked related to yesterday’s JPEG security fix (yes, you can now get hacked/infected/etc. just by looking at an image using Microsoft software), so I went to Windows Update.

And then the pop-up ads started. There should not be any advertisements on Windows Update. Clearly something was wrong.

I spent the next 1½ hours removing adware from his computer. Even after removing the obvious bits through the control panel (some of which left pieces behind), Norton found 21 different pieces of adware, including a program whose sole purpose is to surreptitiously download and install new adware while no-one’s looking, and several programs that claim to block pop-ups, but actually generate them.

Current Mood: 😡annoyed

Blast from the past

Wow. We just turned back on a website account for a customer whose domain was “hijacked” a year ago (IIRC he didn’t renew on time, and someone snatched it up). Apparently he gave up trying to get it back, because he asked us to set it up under a new domain name.

We hadn’t moved the files at all, so all we had to do was change the name in our config. (And fix an error in a CGI script that probably relates to a Perl upgrade, since it presumably worked before.) But the site…

Let me just say it was already old before he lost the domain name. It probably looked old in 1999. Everything’s centered, it’s got blink tags, animated GIFs, a clock and a Java-based music player.

But the thing that caught my attention was the “Netscape Now! 3.0” button.

(Netscape 3 came out in 1996. Windows 95 was still new, IE was barely usable at its own version 3, NCSA was still working on Mosaic and Netscape was still charging money for its browser.)

Current Mood: 🤔nostalgic

A ton of batteries

My boss and I just finished installing 1300 pounds of extra batteries for our server room’s UPS* units, more than doubling our previous backup coverage.

See, the power company has decided they need to cut power to our block for 8 hours tomorrow night in order to do work on the local grid. And here we were with only enough battery power for 2½-3 hours. (This was more than enough back in the era of rolling blackouts, since those only lasted an hour or so.) We can shut down everything on the inside network, no problem… but a five-hour outage for all the websites, email accounts, dialups, DSL accounts, etc. that we host is not something we want to be stuck with.

So we got more batteries.

We’ll still have to be here at least part of the time tomorrow night, keeping an eye on things, turning off internal systems to conserve power, etc. I can’t say I’m looking forward to that.

* That’s uninterruptable power supply, not united parcel service.

Nanofire

A bit of excitement at work today. There was a small electrical fire over the weekend. Fortunately someone was working on Saturday, noticed one of the servers wasn’t responding, went into the server room and saw the plug on a heavy-duty extension cord glowing slightly, with smoke coming out. He unplugged it from the wall, made sure it went out, then rearranged some power cords so he could get back to work.

We’ve bypassed the UPS involved until we can be absolutely sure that (a) it didn’t cause the short and (b) it wasn’t damaged. There’s charring on the outside of the plug where it was in contact with the extension cord, though nothing like what we found inside the other plug. The hot wire had burned clean through, leaving charcoal dust all over the inside of the plug. The cable and the circuit breaker are both rated for 20 amps, so the most likely explanation (since the UPS wasn’t belching flames) is that the cable was faulty – and an extension cord is a lot easier to replace than a 130-lb power supply!