Where has all the time gone?

The last four days have been somewhat of a whirlwind….  I will break it down the best that I can:

Saturday/Sunday:  Finished working on my wife’s car and got it up and running.  What a difference a week and about $500 in parts makes.  I know she hates the car (And now I don’t particularly care for it either), but it is damn near a new car now with all the parts that I just installed.  Oh, well.  At least I am back to driving my Neon.  I had spent the last week driving my full-size conversion van, and it was eating me out of house and home.  I spent over $60 in gas just to drive it for 1 week!  I don’t even spend that in a month, and I drive the Neon twice as much per week!!

Sunday night began an odyssey that I will not soon forget.  I arrived at work about 7pm on Sunday to check on the status of some disk utilities that I was running on a drive on my database server, and started finally updating the OS to Windows Server 2003 to resolve some security issues….Boy was I in for a ride…

Microsoft made some big changes to their service pack 1 for Windows Server 2003, and that set my night off.  After updating my firewall server and my database server, I got a call from the floor that the night shift could not connect to the AS/400 at our other site.  Thinking it was just a poorly seated wireless card on the terminal station (Which is usually true 99% of the time), I went out on the floor to investigate.  Then, after seeing that it was not the card, I check the communications room to see if the T-1’s between the two plants were down…and all 5 were down.  Now, it is already almost midnight, and I am still waiting for one server to finish updating, so I called my provider and we could not figure out what was going on.  All of the sudden, the T-1’s came back up and stayed up, so I cancelled the ticket and went back to my office to verify that I could ping my servers…and I could only hit two of the three NT servers and the AS/400 was unresponsive as well.

It is already midnight, so I had to call the AS/400 admin and wake her up so she could get to that plant (Since she only lived 3 miles away, and I was about 27 miles away) and get the servers back up.  I found out then that there were power issues in that town earlier in the evening, with some lightning.  So, with two servers down, I knew that there had been a long power outage at that plant because the battery backup that powers the NT servers can stay up for almost three hours…

Needless to say, by the time she got there the AS/400 was up but my domain controller at that site was still unresponsive, even though it was up.  First though in my head was that the network card was fried, so I immediately knew that my night was not going to be short….Little did I know that I was right, and it was going to be a long week ahead.

Finally, around 2am the database server was done upgrading and I left for the other plant.  I got there around 2:45am, walked in, rebooted the server, and all was good with the world again.  At this point I am thinking that I will sleep in a little late and show up to work around noon…WRONG!

I got to my house around 4am, laid down, and my phone went off at a quarter to 7am…The database server was inaccessible.  I opened up my VPN and connected to my work network, only to be denied a Remote Desktop connection to any server…CRAP!  You can’t begin to fathom the bad things that I had to say about Microsoft at that point.

I got showered, hauled ass into work, and could not get out to the Internet….now my day is getting worse already.  I ended up having to call Microsoft, only to find that there was an issue with SP1 for Windows 2003 server that prevented communication across VPN connections as well as outbound traffic..Just great.  I ended up having to uninstall SP1 from the firewall server, rebooted, and all was good after that.  My two external VPN sites came back up, and my external VPN users could finally access the internal network and the internal users could get out to the Internet.  One down… one to go.

The database server is a different issue.  I worked all day on that server, working with one of my application vendors that runs software on the database server to see if it was an issue with their application due to the upgrade, and of course it was not.  I did not get home until 8:30pm that night, and went right to sleep.

At 5am Tuesday morning, I got up, went back into work and have worked on this server all day so far.  We have finally narrowed it down to security issues with the Windows upgrade, where it had  mangled the connection to the Active Directory, and so this evening I cam in so I could remove it from the domain and re-add it.  This used to be a fairly simple task, and always worked when attempting to resolve a security issue….WRONG.  Now, it is almost 10pm, I have been on hold with Microsoft for over an hour waiting to talk with a tech to get this server back on the network…This has to be the longest Monday on record…And I have to be back in here by 6am in the morning because I need to support any issues that may arise and I also have someone from my vendor’s office coming in to assist with any application issues.

Leave it to Microsoft to shit in my cornflakes… They secured Windows 2003 alright, so tight that it took down one of the most important servers in our company…

On another note:  The memory module for my carPC unit finally came in today…and it was freaking bad!  Now I have to RMA this and get another one sent to me.  Just what I needed, another disappointment this week.