Variable calendar
The game plan for today seemed reasonable; a training session with some school administrators. I’d installed the test dataset, and my phone list was clear. Collection of a steno pad for taking notes, and a ride over to the training centre. Check. Check. Check.
We settled in to the class/lab when the announcement that our instructor wouldn’t be joining us; seemed that he was detouring via the hospital back in Montreal, possible appendectomy on his revised schedule. Oh well. We’re flexible, so let’s get back to the office for more fun and games.
I wish the day had gone as planned. Sometime before lunch, installed in front of the server rack, I connected with a support desk in Montreal, to figure out why one of our web-based applications wasn’t working … bad choice, in retrospect.
Our web environment has grown like a garden that receives lots of fertilizer and moisture and far too little attention from the gardener. Every time a new species of flowering web application is offered up by the software vendors, we seem to let it take seed on one server in particular. After all, the server is “secure”. It has a “certificate”. People like it. And it has no documentation whatsoever of how the garden works. Virtual madness.
And, in a virtual instant, the time-space continuum tore. All of the virtual servers were GONE. Nothing. A nice machine with lots of code and no useful purpose under heaven. The IIS6 server bits its own tail and swallowed all logical traces of about a dozen sites.
We dug in our heels and investigated, like any support staff would do. We looked high and low, but the end result is that we restored a “schema” that was over a year old, and then rebuilt the servers one by one. We reinstalled our precious SSL certificate. We fielded the four ringing phone lines and the people lines in the doorway that wanted to know why THEIR server wasn’t at the usual place and time. Remember the tear in our time-space continuum?
It took the best of two hours to put all the blocks back in place and restore our webface to the world. I don’t want to do that again in a hurry. Someone started to play the blame game within minutes. Don’t bother; sometimes stuff just happens.
I don’t intend to link up with the remote help desk again any time soon; any symptom can cause a disease, right Doctor? I just wish that when a machine takes on a larger-than-life role that someone would document all those wonderful additions that happen at the end of a day. It won’t happen, but I can still wish.
On a totally different page, the news tonight talked about how we should up the consumption of fish in our diets, to increase our intake of Omega-3 fatty acids and save our hearts. I wonder if the fishburger at my favourite Archway counts?
