Friday Funhouse

I really have nothing exciting to report. We've been toiling away with the landscaping ("weeding" sounds so much better if you call it "landscaping") and that's about it. There is not much new in the house, not much about sport, and no real changes in the garage.

I did find myself lacing up my running shoes last Friday. I'd traced out a route on runstoppable.com from my front door, up the hill, around the block basically, for 2.38 miles. The first two minutes were pretty fun. The rest was, um, interesting. I tried to keep my heart rate down by slowing, but unlike cycling, you just can't coast. Who knew? I arrived back home in a little less than 20 minutes, felt a little shaky like I'd had a good workout, then stretched and cooled down.

It's now a week later and my knees have almost stopped hurting now, and I'm ready for run number two. At this rate, I'm planning on doing my first marathon in 2073.

So what really prompted me to make this post is some great fun I just had at work. This might not translate well outside the system admin realm, but hopefully you'll find a little humor in it. I've changed the names and generalized some terms to protect the guilty and to keep our choice of applications private.

Karen comes running into my office waving her arms in full panic mode, "What's wrong with the server? I can't connect to the server!"

Mind you, this is the server running our general ledger, property control, purchasing stuff, some financials, etc. It's pretty big, and it being down meant a hundred people or so sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

"Geez, I don't know. Hold on." I tried to log in. Sure enough, no dice. I tried to ping it. No response. "Yup, you're right. It's off the air." This was indeed odd. It's one of many servers plugged into a UPS, so power doesn't just disappear. There are very few things that could have taken it down without some trace of what happened.

"What do you mean, 'off the air'? What's wrong with it?"

"I don't know yet." I picked up the phone and dialed Operations, hoping that this problem wouldn't keep me too late on a Friday afternoon.

"Operations, Jim speaking."

"Hi Jim," I said, "Would you please do me a favor and look for any messages on the Finance server console? I think it might be down."

"Yeah," Jim replied, "Karen had me reboot it."

Well, this sure is odd. Jim's telling me Karen told him to reboot the server, and here she is in my office panicking.

"What did you say?" I wanted to make sure I'd heard right.

"Karen had me reboot it. I called her and told her I couldn't get into the Finance application, and she told me to reboot."

At this point, I just broke out laughing. Belly laughing. Right into the phone. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be laughing. Jim, I'm pretty sure she meant to reboot your PC."

"Oh."

The server came back up without any problems, all applications started, mirrored volumes resynched, no corruption on the database. It's pretty lucky considering it'd been brought down hard with a quick flick of the power switch.

So Karen learned to be more explicit in her directions to our Operations staff, Jim learned (hopefully) to call me to double-check before pressing power buttons on my servers, and I had the best laugh I've had in a long time.