Mike’s World

Well, I used today to finish up the paper work for a promotion request (silly company), I will send it off to HR Monday and see what they have to say. I managed to put quite a bit of content in, which is good.

I used most of today to sleep, and man was that nice. I am now catching up on email, and thinking about replacing the hard drive in my PC. The drive in my windows box is making a nice high pitched whine, which is real nice. I am going to try to get a good backup tonight, and get a restore done up tomorrow evening.

Now to finish up Usenet, and get to sleep.

I know its Saturday, but today I started working on the paperwork for something called job role movement. The process with my employer is to fill out a form to make yourself look useful. Others in the company evaluate this, and decide if you should move on or not. I spent the afternoon working on this form, and am about half way done. I have the bullets for the entire thing done, and will be happy when this process is all taken care of.

Today work was spent getting ready for a database upgrade this weekend. We are going to attempt a reverse snapshot sync to do the restore of the database, which should be interesting. If it works good, we will have a valid method to restore our production databases should something bad happen.

Today was spent recovering from my day off yesterday. Some work piled up, so I had to knock that down. Started out with an explanation to our customer as to why the missed 3 days of backups, I cleaned up some old hardware that we are going to send back to Sun as a trade-in, and got some other misc stuff done.

Tonight at my friends house we did the normal bad movie thing, but it was not as bad as normal. A classic came out on DVD, and that was kind of nice. And also because of how much captain Morgan disappeared, I am surprised I made it home after the evening.

Well, I decided to take today off of work. A friend of mine asked me to stop over and talk to his shop about some of the stuff I have done with veritas snapshots, so I thought that was a good excuse to take the day off of work. I slipped in quite a bit, headed down to his shop and talked for a bit, then went to the Italian pie shop for lunch. I had not been to that place for years, it was nice. unfortunately it was not Friday, so they did not have the pizza I liked the most which was deep dish pepperoni and sausage.

After getting back, I cleaned out my car a bit, killed some time and went off to my fathers for dinner. overall a very uneventful day.

After about 4 days, Storagetek has got our B280 disk array back to an operational state. They ended up replacing both controllers, and resetting the configuration, so most of my day was spent reconfiguring the array and recreating snapshots. After three days of missed backups, it was very important to get valid backups tonight.

For the first day in a long time, I had a fairly quiet day. Went through the night without any pages, got to work, and did a bit of problem deflection regarding our disk array, but other than that, nothing interesting happened today. I like a boring day every now and again.

Well, work kept me up all day for the most part. The power outage lasted until about 6:00am, got home at about 7:00am, then paged until about 9:00am. Got to sleep until about 11:00am, then paged some more. At that point I gave up, and went to snow-blow the driveway. Had about 5″ of snow, and the snow-blower loved it. One thing I think I need to look in to is I think that I may getting some fuel line blockage.

I then went to Costco, and found some goodies. Do not know if I am going to justify the $45 fee, but finding a big box of easy-mac was nice. Also picked up jelly beans, chewy granola bars, dryer sheets, shampoo, and some other goodies.

I went to work to reset some fabric switches, then relaxed for the rest of the evening.

Well, bad day on the work side of things today. The STK B280 disk array we use for off-host backups is pretty much offline. STK spent about 4 hours on it today, no luck. No backups until Monday it looks… :-(

Now I need to decide if I stay up or take a nap before the datacenter power up in 2.5 hours.

Today a Sun rep by the title of an Operating System ambassador came in today during lunch. It was very cool, she was not a sales person, but more technical. She works directly with the Solaris engineering teams, and presents to end customers. She spent about 3 hours going over the features of Solaris 10, which the highlights are:
1. Security
2. Dtrace
3. Zones
4. ZFS.

It was a good presentation, and I hope it sparked Solaris 10 in our team.