Monday, February 21, 2005
Adventure 7: 21st Feburary 2005
.....yeah the collander should do it..., hey there, haven't been on for a while..man I've been busy. Time for a bit of a catch up...
Last week was well I don't remember much of last week. I spent most of it in a semi conscious state trying to write documentation for our new WebNonsense application which I'm sposed to be deploying this week.... The "How to reinstall it when you screw it up" guide is now 47 pages long and still it's not done.
The manic Magician was in from Tuesday and try as I might I still got embroiled in his house moving drama. Then helpfully with less than a week to go until deployment and at the time two days to go before the F'off 5 engineer turns up to hook it all together, he suggests we change the design of the system so radically it's taken me until today to get the thing sorted out.
Also on Tuesday, I sent my email notification of outage to the Non-Helpdesk, to be ratified, clarified, approved and then spelt incorrectly, only to find that Mark Klueless (Surface Deliberately Manager), was "In Overton today". Ok I think maybe he'll approve it Wednesday morning, and it'll still be ok to send it in time for Thursday evening's outage. How wrong you can be. He managed however to find time to send me an email stating that he had no knowledge of a piece of software that needed it's maintenance renewing (well it's a piece of shareware that cost £90, for christ's sake!!), no mention though of the email....
Wednesday lunchtime comes and still nothing, I mention this to the grand wizard on the grounds that we'll have to cancel the engineer for Thursday only to find that it's been rejected by the same SD Manager (should've been VD in my book) !! Stating that he didn't know what users would be affected...Now then the email quite clearly states...all users using WWW services..I dunno clues in the question I think...
That was cleared up on Thursday by the Magician going round and throttling him (he does have some uses)...The email goes out stating that Tuesday is the day when the service will be out. Now I specify 1-2 hours and tell them all why "Upgrade of BIGIP operating system". I know in my heart it's question of copying a few files and will only take 10-15 minutes, but hey my business is pain !!!....
We get a response from Chris "bully boy" Nobead, the stand in, "honest guv I'm a contracter" IT Director (funny the company he works for is an outsourcing company too, can't think what the outcome of his firms management consultants IT review will be can you ?), sends an email back saying "nope that's totally unreasonable, during the day, can't you do it on sunday when the power's out"... I nearly did, i promise you, I nearly very nearly replied, a. I don't work sundays or weekends for time off in lieu, coz you aint giving me something that's not already mine, and the engineer doesn't either, besides he's booked for Tuesday and b. I need power to do the f'ing upgrade you muppet!... The magician to the rescue again, I tell you his talk to someone for an hour and say absolutely nothing spell is at breaking point today, The IT mis-director is appeased, we'll give him his very own proxy to play with so he can download his porn from it (after first switching on the logging !! ;-))
The phone rings (in true BOFH style), It's Wos Satsuma, Wos isn't his real name but something I threw together by way of an acronym..Waste Of Space (Wos). "Cre8, I see that you're now backing up the file server every 2 hours when the users are on it....I think it's screwing up the backups" (AAAAAGGGGHHHHGH). "Hang on" I say as I connect to the server, "Wos, the reason the backups from last night haven't finished is because they're all ""WAITING FOR BLOODY MEDIA"" !!!", "yeah I know, it's coz the file server backups are going to often and nabbing the tape drive before the other jobs get a chance"....." Wos, err, no the fileserver backup uses the first drive..., the application backups all use a different one, one we call drive 2, there are no blank or unfil tapes for it to write the data to, consequently it's "WAITING FOR F$%"£$%ing MEDIA!!!", "oh right, should I blank a couple of tapes ?", I nearly said yes but in a fit of peak I complied and said "No, it's ok, I'll do it for you..."
Friday arrives finally (I never thought it'd get here) Mark Bailout is in, his "How to completely knacker your nokia firewall in three easy steps" course only being a 4 day affair. What's this Alex the Brent is in too, having struggled from his death bed (or the Rose and Crown as it's more commonly known!!), to make it in to work..what a trooper !!!
So we're back to the 5 minute fag break syndrome where old "Silver Fox" (bailout) tries to persuade me that when he said (and I quote exactly) "I think it's these snaps that are stopping the backups from running..." what he actually meant was "cre8, any thoughts on why it is the backups haven't been working ? or should I review the logs first"... you know I can see how you'd get confused as they're sooooo similar .... naaat!!!
Sunday, is power down day, we just had an email through, but not just that, they're also planning on painting some more lines in the car park, whoopy do! Why do they send these emails ?
Apparently snow's on the way this week so that should be fun - naaat....
More from today later...
8.
Last week was well I don't remember much of last week. I spent most of it in a semi conscious state trying to write documentation for our new WebNonsense application which I'm sposed to be deploying this week.... The "How to reinstall it when you screw it up" guide is now 47 pages long and still it's not done.
The manic Magician was in from Tuesday and try as I might I still got embroiled in his house moving drama. Then helpfully with less than a week to go until deployment and at the time two days to go before the F'off 5 engineer turns up to hook it all together, he suggests we change the design of the system so radically it's taken me until today to get the thing sorted out.
Also on Tuesday, I sent my email notification of outage to the Non-Helpdesk, to be ratified, clarified, approved and then spelt incorrectly, only to find that Mark Klueless (Surface Deliberately Manager), was "In Overton today". Ok I think maybe he'll approve it Wednesday morning, and it'll still be ok to send it in time for Thursday evening's outage. How wrong you can be. He managed however to find time to send me an email stating that he had no knowledge of a piece of software that needed it's maintenance renewing (well it's a piece of shareware that cost £90, for christ's sake!!), no mention though of the email....
Wednesday lunchtime comes and still nothing, I mention this to the grand wizard on the grounds that we'll have to cancel the engineer for Thursday only to find that it's been rejected by the same SD Manager (should've been VD in my book) !! Stating that he didn't know what users would be affected...Now then the email quite clearly states...all users using WWW services..I dunno clues in the question I think...
That was cleared up on Thursday by the Magician going round and throttling him (he does have some uses)...The email goes out stating that Tuesday is the day when the service will be out. Now I specify 1-2 hours and tell them all why "Upgrade of BIGIP operating system". I know in my heart it's question of copying a few files and will only take 10-15 minutes, but hey my business is pain !!!....
We get a response from Chris "bully boy" Nobead, the stand in, "honest guv I'm a contracter" IT Director (funny the company he works for is an outsourcing company too, can't think what the outcome of his firms management consultants IT review will be can you ?), sends an email back saying "nope that's totally unreasonable, during the day, can't you do it on sunday when the power's out"... I nearly did, i promise you, I nearly very nearly replied, a. I don't work sundays or weekends for time off in lieu, coz you aint giving me something that's not already mine, and the engineer doesn't either, besides he's booked for Tuesday and b. I need power to do the f'ing upgrade you muppet!... The magician to the rescue again, I tell you his talk to someone for an hour and say absolutely nothing spell is at breaking point today, The IT mis-director is appeased, we'll give him his very own proxy to play with so he can download his porn from it (after first switching on the logging !! ;-))
The phone rings (in true BOFH style), It's Wos Satsuma, Wos isn't his real name but something I threw together by way of an acronym..Waste Of Space (Wos). "Cre8, I see that you're now backing up the file server every 2 hours when the users are on it....I think it's screwing up the backups" (AAAAAGGGGHHHHGH). "Hang on" I say as I connect to the server, "Wos, the reason the backups from last night haven't finished is because they're all ""WAITING FOR BLOODY MEDIA"" !!!", "yeah I know, it's coz the file server backups are going to often and nabbing the tape drive before the other jobs get a chance"....." Wos, err, no the fileserver backup uses the first drive..., the application backups all use a different one, one we call drive 2, there are no blank or unfil tapes for it to write the data to, consequently it's "WAITING FOR F$%"£$%ing MEDIA!!!", "oh right, should I blank a couple of tapes ?", I nearly said yes but in a fit of peak I complied and said "No, it's ok, I'll do it for you..."
Friday arrives finally (I never thought it'd get here) Mark Bailout is in, his "How to completely knacker your nokia firewall in three easy steps" course only being a 4 day affair. What's this Alex the Brent is in too, having struggled from his death bed (or the Rose and Crown as it's more commonly known!!), to make it in to work..what a trooper !!!
So we're back to the 5 minute fag break syndrome where old "Silver Fox" (bailout) tries to persuade me that when he said (and I quote exactly) "I think it's these snaps that are stopping the backups from running..." what he actually meant was "cre8, any thoughts on why it is the backups haven't been working ? or should I review the logs first"... you know I can see how you'd get confused as they're sooooo similar .... naaat!!!
Sunday, is power down day, we just had an email through, but not just that, they're also planning on painting some more lines in the car park, whoopy do! Why do they send these emails ?
Apparently snow's on the way this week so that should be fun - naaat....
More from today later...
8.
# posted by cre8 @ 9:23 AM 
