It was with a hint of dread and a large dollop of hope that I trekked down to the office this afternoon. You see, the main office fileserver lost a hard drive last week. This would normally be the sort of thing one would stay all night overnight to repair ASAP, but considering the drive failed without my even knowing it until I just happened to look at the drive array and noticed the amber indicator, I wasn’t all that worried. The server could jolly well tick along for another couple of days, I figured.

Oddly enough, I figured correctly.

The server’s an HP ProLiant DL380 G3, which in non-geek terms loosely translates to “expensive server, designed to be mounted in an equipment rack, that features (for the sake of this entry) hard drives you can take out and replace while the machine’s still running.” My experiences with “hot-swap” hard drive technology has been mixed, to say the least. The good old Dell PowerEdge 2300? Never a problem. Ben and I popped drives in and out of that thing on a weekly basis for a while there, at the downtown KKSN-FM office. Some of the other hot-swap equipment, however, sort of soured me on the concept. (Longtime readers will remember some episodes of fun and frolic involving the Enco server…)

Today, though, was something of a revelation. It went something like this:

1. Arrive at office.
2. Unlock cabinet containing spare hard drive (that I was lucky to have in the first place).
3. Offer silent prayer to whatever gods of geekery might be listening.
4. Pop the release on the old drive.
5. Give the drive a few seconds to spin down.
6. Remove old drive.
7. Insert new drive, latch into place.
8. Watch happy green lights appear.
9. Turn out the lights, lock up the office and go home.

All told, this was about a five minute job, and that’s counting all time spent in the building. I’m not kidding. Sure, the drive’s going to be rebuilding for a few hours yet… but I don’t need to watch over it. If the whole thing fails, I’ll get a message on my phone about it. In my experience, though, if it was going to fail it would already have done so.

Awesome. Ye gods, I want more of those servers!

Today was the first of a couple of housekeeping days at the office. The Roomie came in to work with me today and we basically spent the entire day chucking crap I’ve been hoarding since before the stations moved into their current digs.

Yes, I even threw out the old SyQuest EZ135. I agonized over that decision, however. I’m really going to miss that old beast. (And by “miss” I mean “think about it wistfully but never actually want to use it.”)

We hauled out boxes of old CDs, floppies, manuals and odd computer-related detritus. I managed to cut my finger and wrench my elbow quite painfully, which just goes to show that I’m out of shape. But we knew that, eh?

Tomorrow we’ll finish dumping the junk, and hopefully also get some other administrivia and organizational bits done…

Let me paint you a mental picture. One of our employees is gazing with frustration at his computer screen, on which the contents of his Recycle Bin are displayed instead of the email login prompt he was expecting. In a fit of frustration, he comes to see me.

“Every time I open Groupwise I get my Recycle Bin.”

“Wow. That’s weird. Are you sure the icons aren’t on top of one another?” I’ll grant you that it’s unlikely, but it’s the first thing that comes to mind.

“Nope.”

“Have you tried clicking and dragging the Groupwise icon somewhere else on your screen to be sure?”

“Yep, I’ve done that.”

BZZZT! Wrong answer! There’s no way in hell the co-irker in question, technophobe that he is, would have tried that. Sorry, but when you try to make yourself look smart while I’m tossing out non-obvious solutions (my brain’s funny that way, I tend to think of the weirdest possible fix first, then the obvious stuff later), all you’re going to do is prove that you’re a dumbass.

So I trucked over to his desk. Sure enough, the Recycle Bin is open… and there’s a blinking taskbar item indicating that yes, indeed, Groupwise’s login prompt is awaiting input.

Here’s what happened: See, it turns out that Novell’s ZENworks has a quirk under XP and 2000. When you launch a ZEN icon, keyboard focus is then kicked back to the desktop. So when you don’t notice this, blindly type your password (and said password starts and ends with the letter ‘r’, as in ‘recycle bin’), then hit “enter” when you’re done… what do you suppose is going to open up?

Yeah. So now he knows what everyone else in the building knows, namely that you have to click on the login prompt before typing your password. Sheesh.

The workday wasn’t too terrible, and in fact I accomplished a number of nifty things. A not-so-nifty chore I wasn’t looking forward to, though, was setting up our Office Manager on a new network arrangement that includes an HP print server (since she now has to share her printer with her new cubemate). Traditionally the job of making HP JetDirect servers talk to Netware fileservers has been the stuff of ulcers.

I didn’t have much choice this time, though, so I went ahead and ran the installer off of the CD-ROM, figuring that in the worst case scenario I’d at least be able to find out what IP address the print server had taken, even if no other part of the install worked as advertised.

Not only did it work — the first time — but it did so with almost no required input from Yours Truly. I’m not kidding. The only thing I changed was the print queue name (to something slightly less cryptic, given the way XP names network printers… argh). The test page printed. Installing the new print queue on the end-user computer was also flawlessly smooth.

So, uh, who let the flying pigs out? ‘Cause this is freaky, man.