all day i domn annoying servers
I think canonical stupid playground expansion of Adidas was “all day I dream about sex,” but I remember one particularly stupid variant I heard when I was in elementary school: “all day in dad’s apartment, sexing.” Sexing? The only time I’ve heard that word used is when talking about identifying the gender of an animal – namely a guinea pig.
Anyway, this is all beside the point, but I am feeling punchy. I only slept a few hours last night, for reasons which I will now explain.
As I wrote earlier this week, work has been pretty busy. Wednesday and Thursday were pretty nutty, and I had planned to use Friday to sort of take stock of the whole situation and start deciding how we could learn from the problems we’d had. Unfortunately, Friday morning one of our RAIDs started complaining, and the guy with whom I was going to have that conversation went to put in a new spare. I went to lunch, thinking, “Well, it’s been an interesting week! At least $CRITICAL_COMPLICATED_COMPONENT has been fine.”
I didn’t even say it out loud, but it didn’t matter. While Kris was at the colo, the CCC went down. This had relatively major effects, and we all started trying to deal with them. Some of them were very Postfix-related, and over my head, so I called in Bryan, who sat and hacked at that part of the problem while I dealt with other bits.
All of our efforts to cope with the problem seemed to be winning battles, except getting the system itself back up and running. Once we put a little time into it, though, even that problem fell before the might of our combined brains! Helen and Kris re-colocated the server while Bryan and I caught a cab back to his place. With a little bit of cleanup and post-failure troubleshooting, everything was pretty much back to normal. My head hit the pillow (by which I mean the armrest of Bryan’s sofa) at about 0230.
This morning, I woke up around five thirty. The sun was up and there was a big window behind me, so there wasn’t much to it but to get up. I wasn’t feeling too exhausted, really, and I even enjoyed fixing a little bug or two that had shown up overnight. I must say that this week’s activities have given me a much-desired sense of understanding of many of our systems. They’re still mostly a mystery, but now they’re a mystery the shape of which I understand.
Figuring that I might as well take the early bus home, I put my shoes on and, just as I went to wake Bryan (because I couldn’t get out the gate of his trinity without him to unlock and re-lock it), his roommate wandered downstairs and let me use his keys. I feel a little bad about leaving without saying good bye or thanking him again, but I think it was better to just let him sleep.
Today, Gloria worked the 0400 to 0800 desk shift at the gym, and is then leading an 0900 yoga class. I’m thinking that maybe she’ll feel like taking a nap afterwards, and we can get in a little napping together, which will be OK, even if it’s not a substitute for a full night of sleep together.
I have more things to write about, I think, but I’m going to save it for later. right now I’m going to try to figure out where we are and how long until we get home. (Hm. I think we just made our Willow Grove stop…)