Sunday, March 22, 2009

Multiple Bogies

My wife has had worse on-calls, but for sheer impact, this one is going to be hard to beat.

They had a tape drive system go down at about 3AM. That drive system feeds five different complexes. Five mega complexes -- many sub-systems, many customers.

In order to fix the tape drive system, they are looking at having to simultaneously punch all five massive systems, and then bring them all back up, one by one.

There is no job in Mudville, today. What was it Bill Clinton used to say? I feel their pain....

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Ouch... I've had a few nights like that!

What happened to loose association between critical components?

Carolyn Ann

Cerulean Bill said...

It turns out that the network folks thought it'd be fun to rename IP addresses. Oh, was that one in use?

Unknown said...

If I had to guess, I'd say the network people had a communication breakdown. :-)

Who redoes IP addresses, these days? You set up DHCP, and it handles everything for you! Easy, and you don't get problems like that.

Reminds me of the time some guy described the way their SNMP system worked. (A single SNMP trap could go through 2 mainframes!) I asked him, unfortunately, if it wouldn't be quicker to send a postcard...

I've always admired tact. Never sought any, just admired it. :-)

Carolyn Ann

Cerulean Bill said...

Damned if I know. It once took me fifteen minutes of discussion with a network guy -- a friendly network guy, unlike a lot of them -- to determine that his Gateway System was my System 98AS. I couldn't get him to tell me that Gateway was a concept, not a software package. He couldn't get me to tell him that my operating system was the thing that made his software available. We were both a little exasperated by the time it was done.

I once annoyed him by setting his task priority way down, but giving it the right to take over the machine if it needed immediate capacity. And then his response time problems went away. Hmmm....