You’ve heard this one, I’m sure: “Lack of preparedness on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Whoops, I’m terribly sorry. It turns out that lack of preparedness on someone else’s part does, in fact, constitute an emergency on my part. This afternoon I enjoyed the dubious pleasure of running around dealing with the fact that Metro Networks changed the entire website delivery system for up-to-the-minute traffic info… and didn’t tell anyone beforehand. Just one short email with the new URL, instructions and (it turns out) new passwords would have saved me all sorts of stress.

Oh, yeah. They insisted at first that the “current” passwords would work fine. Bzzzzt.

Then I find out that their new website looks like crap in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. In one, the text is too big and the text window too small, so one has to scroll sideways to read an entire line of text. In the other, the text window is black text on a black background. That’s rather useless, wouldn’t you agree? The solution in both browsers is to click on a tiny, unlabeled icon that launches the text document itself in a dedicated window, nicely unformatted for ease of use.

The entire new system is so counterintuitive as to be nigh-useless, and I fully expect phone calls tomorrow morning from show producers and air talents who’re confused and upset. I won’t be able to blame them one bit, either.

So in among all of the other fun stuff going on right now (do the names Sarbanes and Oxley ring any bells?) I get to find a geek-fu solution to this little nightmare. Wonderful.

Once again I’m at the office, this time at the tail end of my monthly Traffic server backup. It takes five hours to fill the first tape and about an hour and a half to fill the second… give or take.

I managed to amuse myself, however, by successfully getting City of Heroes to work on the future “lobby video” computer. Hey, it was that or six solid hours of anime and Neopets.

Hmm, wait…

By 9:30 this morning I knew something was horribly wrong. Several computers located all over the building were unable to sign onto the fileserver. The error message, when input to Google and Novell’s support site, turned out to be singularly unhelpful.

By 10:30 I’d exhausted most of the seemingly-obvious solutions. By 12:30 I’d rebooted the fileserver, to no avail. By 1:30 I’d downloaded updates to every bit of software I could think of.

At 2:30 I noticed that someone’s computer was plugged into a “new” jack in that particular office. Oh, hell. The “new” jack meant that their computer wasn’t on the “old” set of racks in the server room, but instead on the “expansion” racks, which meant that…

Yep. One of the network switches in the expansion racks is hosed. Moving the affected individuals’ network connections to other switches fixed their problems completely. If I’d simply traced the damned network connections in the first place I could have saved at least five hours of work.

Of course, actually tracing out everyone’s connections and getting them moved took another hour.

So if you’ve been wondering, “What kind of idiot is this guy, anyway?” Now you know.

I love the fact that someone can save a file in PowerPoint, end up with a corrupted file (at least, corrupted enough for PowerPoint itself to throw up a cryptic, useless error message when someone tries to open said file), and I can come along with OpenOffice.org to save the day by opening the supposedly-corrupt file and saving it to a new, working copy.

…from my Linux box.

Sure, some of the font and formatting information is gone, but at least the AE hasn’t lost the fruits of their labor. Heck, it’s not even their fault… I mean, they are “saving often” like we tell them to, after all. It’s PowerPoint itself that seems to have issues.

Go, OpenOffice.org!

The beeping started at a bit after 2:30 this morning.

“Logger 2 is DOWN!” read the message on my phone.

“Okay,” I said, and crawled back into bed.

Three minutes later, “Logger 2 is UP!”

“Great,” I said, and crawled back into bed.

Thus began an ordeal that continued until, oddly enough, just about the time I left for work. Every twenty to forty minutes, I’d get a false alarm on either Logger 1 or 2. As you might imagine, after a couple of hours I was losing patience, not to mention any chance at a restful night’s sleep. And in case you’re thinking, “Why didn’t you just turn off the phone?” all I can say is, “And that’d be the exact moment that a real emergency reared its head, and if nobody can reach me during one of those then my head could roll.”

I found the problem, though it wasn’t (specifically) with the Logger computers themselves. Oh, no. It was Servers Alive, which I’d reinstalled recently. The detection timeouts for Loggers 1 and 2 were set to 5 seconds, while Logger 3’s was set to 20 seconds. No wonder I never got a false alarm for #3, eh? What’s more, for some reason Servers Alive had reverted to a check schedule of every three minutes during off-peak weekday hours! Hello? Overkill much? Even worse, the weekend on- and off-peak check intervals were set to every single minute. Ouch.

The timeouts are now set correctly, as are the check intervals. The fixes come too late to get my lost night of sleep back, but at least if my phone beeps at me tonight it probably won’t be a false alarm… I hope.