Last day at work ...

[reddragdiva]

ladylilith arrived this morning, safe and somewhat sound. Then I went to w3rk to be greeted with a power outage (someone cut an 11kV power line and a large chunk of the street was out). Then an impossible request for urgent data recovery, something along the lines of:

"Er, I really need access to a document."
(incredulous looks from sysadmins) "The power is out. They say it'll be restored by 2pm, we should be up an hour or two after that."
"Look, I REALLY need this document. It's the business plan for the quarter."
"There is no way."
"Can't we bring up just one server?"
"Not without power to the server room."
"Isn't there a UPS or something?"
"Yes. It ran the servers for thirty minutes while we shut everything down safely. Now it's drained."
"Can we get power in to power up the server?"
"Er, no." [What was he thinking, a three-phase cable strung from across the road?]
"Don't we have a building generator or something?"
"If we had one, we wouldn't have noticed the power outage."
"Look, it's in racks of disks, right? Can we pull out the disk that has it on it?"
"No, it's a RAID array on a NetApp. You need all the disks for the data to make sense."
"Do we have backup tapes?"
"It'd be on the backup tapes. The index for which is on the powered-down server. Going all through all seven tapes, at a few hours a tape ... Well, it would be possible. If we have a recovery room set up with the software. Or install the software on a laptop, which will take about an hour, and attach a DLT with a SCSI PC card, which [Unix admin] has a couple of at home. The power will be on by then, though. This is why time for recovery from backup is normally given as forty-eight hours."
"Are you SURE there isn't a way?"
"We'll let you know."

The power came on about five minutes later, and the servers were all up about an hour after that. Lucky luser!

The company admin is already amusing himself writing a business plan for a backup method that could satisfy this Important Business Requirement. Of course, will the whiners pay for it? I don't bloody think so.

The rest of the day has been rebooting a few workstations and counting the seconds until home time. Baaaaaaaah!

Comments

[sliding-loopz.livejournal.com]

it's days like that when you wished you'd purchased your very own hamster in a wheel! as then you could get it to generate power... :)

[greap.livejournal.com]

I wonder who he would get to run on the wheel. Possibly the NT techs.

[reddragdiva]

They have to be good for something, after all.

Re:

[greap.livejournal.com]

So he who admits he never has any work wouldnt have a go on teh wheel?

[reddragdiva]

Certainly not. Physical labour is for those lower beings.

[lpetersson.livejournal.com]

Awwww, that no nice :'(
I'm good for lots of things...
But ok, it was amusing.
Servus,
Mr Eleganza
MS Techie

[marnameow.livejournal.com]

Be grateful that you *had* a UPS and no fool decided to restore power while you were on your way to disconnect the pooters.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

More power to the plan writer! If the beancounters do go for it, as remote as that may be, there will be gobs of nice new kit to play with, and old kit to be rescued from the Great Bin in the alley.

[reddragdiva]

Old kit? You assume ANYTHING ever gets thrown out here. There are cupboards in the machine room filled with DLT-IIs and their drives. 8mm and 4mm tapes. SGI install media. 9600bps modem.

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

You have a plan then, for copious free time (heh). Organize Inventory and Depreciation Week. You need a tape subsystem for home, right? 20g of backup sucks for work servers, but isn't unusable for a home rig.

And if you don't want it, I'll pay shipping and bother with paypal and oreos shipped back.

[loubie.livejournal.com]

How sharper than a serpent's tooth to have a thankless child: ... (sorry, couldn't resist that one:-)))

Weird

[inulro.livejournal.com]

At my place, it's more like "no power? I'm going shopping."

[jojof.livejournal.com]

isn't "the server ate my business plan" a good enough excuse?

the telecommunications company i worked for had a "service level agreement" about backing up servers, however it said nothing about being able to restore from backups..