View From the Bushes

I realize that posts from the last few days have been pretty boring, but since I've basically been doing nothing other than trying to fix the damaged server, I don't have much else to write about. I did start reading Atonement yesterday. So far it's reasonably interesting, though for some reason the writing style reminds me of the female half of that old team writing humor piece. In any event, it's very, very introspective but written in the third person with multiple view points, the combination of which gives it a certain surreal quality. I was going to read Atlas Shrugged as my next book, but I admit that I've always been a little daunted by its 1000 pages.

Okay, so that's really all I can write about which doesn't have anything to do with my dead server, or as we like to call it, my 'super-secure' server (it's so secure that no one can get on it). I was here last night until about ten trying to recreate the server on another machine. At one point in the evening, one of my co-workers deleted the tape-backup of the server and it looked like we were really screwed. Fortunately it only deleted the index, not the actual data, and we were able to recover it. Once the restore was complete we found that none of the database (ODBC) connections to other servers worked and that additionally no one knew the passwords necessary to establish those connections (this has been a bad week for passwords). By ten o'clock all we had was a new server with less functionality than the old server, and no way to get the information necessary to make it any more functional so we called it a night.

This morning we were able to uncover all of the necessary passwords and we got one of the applications up and running without a hitch. That's when we discovered that the other password we had didn't work, even though everyone from one end of the company to another was convinced that this was in fact the correct password. So as of this afternoon I have one server which mostly works but is completely unaccessible otherwise and one server which is accessible but doesn't even work as well as the one we're trying to fix. Fortunately, we have gotten to the point where the problem is no longer in the '16 hour days until it's fixed' category, but rather the 'as soon as possible,' which means I can actually go home this evening.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross