Those poor newspaperists

I'd hate to be working in our head office today. Last night we pronounced our server dead. Yup, no files. The remnants of the server presently sit on my desk at home while I eagerly devise a solution to not having any files to create newspapers with. I'd hate to be in there right now, as I'm sure sharp objects would be thrown at me.

I'm the guy who's supposed to fix these things, and I couldn't, but not for lack of trying; I was still at it at 11pm last night, while on the phone with our IT department in Vancouver. Apparently I have to mail a pizza to Lawrence, the IT wizard because he was doing this work from home. I wasn't so lucky, I was 50 km away, in Kingsville.

I was actually done work at 11am yesterday morning, but because I work with the Kingsville cadets on Thursday nights, I was going to hang around, off the clock. I didn't feel like driving back to Windsor just to turn around again. At 3, I got a call that the server was non-responsive and they wanted me to immediately go to Tecumseh. So I did, in the blowing snow, I made it there in 45 minutes, took the drive out, and headed to our repair guy here to see if he could rescue the drive. Luckily, I had another machine there that was just being finished up, so I had a working G5 to test. It didn't work. So with Vancouver on the phone telling me what to buy, I walked out of Marty's shop with $700 worth of new drives and other crap, and headed back to Tecumseh. My thought was to try to mount the server drives in the G5 (they're identical machines) and try to mount them. Nothing worked.

Back on the phone with Vancouver. We brainstormed for a while, the only thought on my mind at this point is how to get the contents of the Kingsville server moved. Lawrence's idea was to clone the server onto the G5. Interesting idea, so off I went into the storm, back to Kingsville. I hooked everything up, called him to let him know he could start, and headed off to meet my corps friends for dinner - all this was conveniently timed! After food I headed back to the office to check progress, but there wasn't any. We couldn't clone the drive. At least we tried. Right now, it's 9:30am, and my boss is heading back to Kingsville for me to get data moved so they can at least try to rebuild.

This is a lesson in backups. Three papers going out on Tuesday with nothing archived. Yippee. I'd hate to be in that office right now. I'm sure there's people swearing. Alot. At me. I don't control the equipment, I just fix it. Now, a valuable lesson has been learned, and hopefully this never happens again. As for the drive that failed, made in China. Need I say more.

Cheers.