Verbal Diarrhea

I've been looking back over the seven days since I started this blog, and so far it reads like I've done ten rounds in the golden ring with Johnathan Ross. I've got out only the smallest fraction of what is in my system, and what affects my life. I'm jumping around like a jack in the box, and I don't seem to have any structure. My attempts to drag a little discipline in to my meagre existance has so far been thwarted, but I'm working on it.

We also had a server outage at work yesterday afternoon. For those of you who are familiar with your average home computer, it's no hassle. When you are looking after forty or so servers with terrabytes of data on them, starting and stopping the beasts becomes something akin to starting and stopping an ocean liner. Starting the servers after a power outage is like waking a fifty foot ogre with a hangover from drinking several breweries the night before. It has to be done with extreme care, and you pray to every God in theoretical existance (as well as those that aren't) that the whole situation doesn't turn around and bite you on the arse; 'cause it will take a heafty chunk out of your jeans.

Of course, the theory is that the UPS (Uninteruptable Power Supply - basically a great big sod off battery that can supply power at mains juice levels enough to keep the servers running) should allow everything to shut down cleanly. Well, that's the theory. In practice, shutting down forty odd servers before your UPS batteries run flat takes time. Exacerbated by the fact that the console controlling the whole shebang (the keyboard, mouse and monitor) was plugged in to a UPS that only lasted five minutes, meant that we could only bring down certain machines cleanly.

When the power eventually came on, more than an hour later, it was a very tense time bringing everything back up again. Added to the lessons learned list, was the requirement to get the seat by the console, replaced with a toilet; 'cause that's what the operator most feels like needing at that particular moment in time.

I was glad to find out that we weren't the only ones with problems yesterday. Regular readers will notice that there isn't a list of stupid searches today. That's because the log file that my ISP usually sends me, is 0 bytes in length; ie. it's empty.

Don't you just love technology.