Everything Falls Apart

So today after the staff meeting I had a peculiar happening: A loud, annoying, brain-piercing alarm began to go off.

Beeeeeeeep. Beeeeeep. Over and over.

At first I thought it was the battery back up. These things start to go bad eventually and can lead to alarms noting you of its soon demise. However, that wasn’t it.

I began to do the listening test by holding my head up to any alarm-capable system. After determining that it was in my office, I then got on the floor and crawled around until I finally deduced that our main network server had just imploded.

Oh. Hell.

Well, at that point I begin to research into a system I had very little experience in. I mean, the thing works, it’s been working, and I’ve gotten a somewhat decent grasp on the backup schema but the hardware itself was still a mystery.

Let’s just say that mystery has been solved. I dug, I found, I counted, I marked every piece of hardware I could to determine that the original SCSI drives that the old bastard came with were the problem. In fact, just one of them was, but due to Raid 0 and how it handles files (I won’t get terribly geeky here, but let’s just say that if you use 2 drives as “1 big drive” that if 1 goes bad, you’re in deep shit) I was in trouble.

After disabling the alarm that had been going off for 5 minutes (yes, I was going insane) I finally find the menu which will bring the bad hardware back online. It’s then I get a message similar to this one:

Hi, I’m your SCSI Card. Do you know what you’re doing? Because if I bring this drive online and it’s as fucked up as I’m suspecting it is (I did disable it, now didn’t I?), ALL of your data could be lost.

You’re cool with that, right? YES – NO

Of course, that’s my Humorous Paraphrasing, but it’s close enough (and more entertaining). Long story short, I said YES and the drive went online with no problems. After booting into Windows, I immediately took all of our files off the bad drive(s) (remember they’re seen at 1 big drive in Windows) and am dealing with small problems as a result of this explosion.

So, that’s my afternoon. Busy, busy. I now have to go take care of a bunch of issues relating to this meltdown, and eventually take the server offline so I can remove the drives permanently. What fun!

Oh, lastly, Ericka and I caught Cabin Fever last night (see, I’m clever). Decent flick, nothing special, I’m glad I didn’t pay to see it. A rental at best.