journaling: enabled

Sorry updates have been sparse of late. Don’t really have much reason for it. This past weekend Liz and I attended a wedding down in Iowa. The bride was so happy she looked about ready to explode … and would turn into a big cloud of happy confetti. On the way back we got to see the trees that were downed near Le Seuer on Hwy 169. Pretty serious stuff.

Monday night Liz and I had a nice “date” at home. We finally watched Pearl Harbor together (the one with Ben Affleck in case anybody is wondering). It’s the first time I’ve seen the movie since I bought it a few years back. I really enjoyed it. Listened to the soundtrack on the way into work this morning (yesterday’s music was Celine Dion!!).

Today at work started off fairly reasonably. One of the projects I’ve been working on is getting a Smartboard Sympodium ready to go for one of the distance education rooms. That took a fair amount of time this morning but I think it’s pretty much done. This afternoon I helped a co-worker set up a classroom computer with projector in the photography lab in KFA.

At 3 o’clock I had a meeting that pretty much started the downhill slide for the day. I got reminded why I detest Windows … or at least the security issues that go with it. We’re rolling out some wireless access on campus using Cisco Clean Access. We’re requiring that Windows users have up-to-date anti-virus software and that their Windows patches be up-to-date. So I think a lot of our support load is going to fall into the arena of getting people’s computers up-to-snuff … but we have a policy that we don’t work on personal computers. We didn’t get details ironed out today so I get to work on that some more tomorrow. Yay. Two hours of meetings plus who knows how much time planning.

Tonight at the end of the day I had scheduled an upgrade for our lab software license server software. This went pretty well when I did it on our test servers but of course not-so-well in production. It took me over 90 minutes to get the new software running to the point where I could connect to it with the administrator’s “console”. After that, I couldn’t get it the lab clients to connect. In the end I ended up reverting back to the old version and will have to try again later. I’m thinking we’ll eventually run this on a Windows server much as I hate the idea … simply because the Linux version seems rather hard to deal with (kill -9 should not be the “recommended” way to shut down the server daemon.)

Anyway … bedtime for me. *yawn*

Well, work has been interesting in the past 50 hrs or so. At approximately 2:50pm on Friday, the main power transformer serving campus failed. If that wasn’t exciting enough, some of our battery packs for UPSes in our server room started venting gas (of the hydrogen sulfide variety). I’m not sure what percentage of our servers got shut down gracefully but I think at least a few went down hard. Six IT staff went to the hospital via ambulance for treatment for gas exposure. Power was restored late yesterday afternoon. If I understand correctly, it’s a temporary replacement transformer so there will probably be another outage … hopefully planned. Last night through this morning was spent getting batteries recharged and back online along with the network hardware (= switches). At noon there was a meeting which I decided to attend for information (I wasn’t involved in anything to this point). Ended up getting roped into working (most of which was acting as a “buddy” in one of our server rooms with battery packs). Most services were restored by 8:30 tonight though a few are still being worked on. Hopefully those aren’t too difficult for the staff remaining to restore. Tomorrow of course I’ll probably get to deal with fallout from office workstations that went down hard. Yay.