went to tulsa monday night to work on a gig for Williams Communications. Just run of the mill stuff like racking some servers and installing solaris and veritas stuff. Problem is, they've not got the network cable run through, nor the disks from the san. I came home Wednesday night since they weren't going to have it for a while and I was pretty much useless.
However, when I came home Wednesday, I read my email and it said that the drive on the main OU webserver was about to fail so we needed to replace the machine since we didn't have any reliable replacements... it was an ultra 2... and no, ebay wasn't an option. We stood up a much larger and newer server to be the webserver, but the fact that the storage array was connected with differential scsi and we didn't have an HBA for it for the newer server, we had to think of a few options, most of which were not viable in the end. Come 7am the next morning after working through the night, we called our sun rep to get us a diff. scsi HBA for the newer server and got it installed and connected to the storage array. We had already prepared apache and the OS for it so it was just a matter of switching IP's.
Anyways, I still had to work a lot to make up for my time in PA and Tulsa so I kept working until around 5 and came home and crashed. I've been working more or less non-stop since then as well.
Oh and here's a few tips for later...
1) No matter how much under control you think the situation is, don't turn down expert help. That's why they're there.
2) When in a large, corporate, non-university site, don't DON'T transfer out any information, even if it's to have your consultant coworkers examine some hardware logs. Network security people in a large org. by definition have neither a sense of humor, nor a forgiving nature.
3) Read the manual
Going back to Tulsa probably on tuesday night for wednesday through friday. Yay, 30 hours more deficit at OU I have to make up... I hope I get to see this money soon.
Posted by Orpheus at February 01, 2004 04:12 PMThats my new chant: readthemanualreadthemanualreadthemanual
thus avoiding low volt electric shocks, bad sex, and dinner that looks like something the cat threw up
Posted by: adrianne on February 6, 2004 04:49 AM#2: Use PGP/GPG. I'd say ask first, but it will inevitably be 'no'. Unless the network security department is your actual paying client, just bypass 'em, but with proper respect for the information.
I'll also add a #4:
Document daily. Even if you did only run-of-the-mill stuff. The last thing you want is for your boss or your client to come to you with an problem you knew nothing about asking, "Well what did you do that day?" and reply, "I don't remember exactly." You'll also never know when that stuff comes in handy later when you've forgotten it.