What an incredibly craptacular day. I get to work this morning and everything is fine. That is until I remember that there is another of those damn ‘product fairs’ or whatever they are in my building about 10 feet from my cube. A couple of hundred people talking loudly, peeping over my wall (I’m the last cube by the entrance), wandering around. Presently, there are some Shakespearean actors doing some sort of deal on a stage. What it is, I can’t hear over the din. They have also co-opted the coffee/break area for this deal. They’ve got refreshments and snacks and whatnot for these people. Apparently, this fair isn’t even for local employees… the signs I’ve seen reference people coming from a local hotel (conference style)… lots of parking signs in the lot outside… Lord knows they wouldn’t spend money on their boring old regular employees. *sigh*
I’m so lucky to sit where I do. There is no one in the entire building closer to this circus than I am.
But that is not the best part of my day. About 10:30 this morning, I get an instant message from another developer wondering if there is something wrong with our server. I was just working on it, so I don’t think so, but I go out and check again. Hmmmm… that website isn’t coming up. Try a different one. Nope… not that one either. Well, hell… something is wrong with the server. Seeing as my entire job consists of creating and editing content on this one server, there is not much I can do. I contact the server admin and he does a quick check. I’m hoping he just has to restart it and we’ll be back in business. Well, he can’t get parts of the server to respond. That is not a good thing. Then he tells me, “ooo… looks like the entire E:\ drive is gone”. Well, that is where all 10 gigabytes of our websites live. He drops everything and goes into the server room. When he gets there, IT is already there working on the problem. Apparently, the disk array in the server failed. Took everything with it.
They give him an ETA of “about an hour, probably”. Well, it is now 4 hours later, and we’re still waiting. The last update I’ve gotten (20 minutes ago), they’ve replaced the failed hardware and are now restoring from a backup. Restoring 10 gigs from backup is going to take a long time. This whole day is shot in the ass.
The best part is that since the server has gone down, I have fielded about instant messages from 25 different people, 9 emails, and 3 phone calls… all asking me the exact same question. “Something wrong with the server?”. I relay to them the same info I’ve gotten. It’s all I can do. So, besides answering the same question over and over, there has been nothing I could do today. Twiddling my thumbs. Bored out of my skull. Can’t escape the throngs and work from home due to the server being down and I have to notify everyone when it comes back up. Just a real banner day all around.