All told, today’s been an even better day than yesterday. Busy as hell, yes. Thankless and demoralizing, no.
And if I’d known that removing the old server from the network would revive ZENworks, I’d have done so Saturday morning instead of waiting until almost noon today. Hellfire and damnation.
I’m hoping that this is the last “run around the building all day long” kind of day for a while. With ZEN on my side again, it very well may be. Huzzah!
All things being equal, today hasn’t been all that bad.
I strolled into the office shortly before 9:00am and proceeded to perform the required tasks upon nearly every computer in the building. What are these tasks? I’m glad you asked.
That last bit is the tedious part, since “point and print” still adamantly refuses to live up to its name. I just know I’m going to dream about print driver install dialog windows tonight. Le sigh.
The really entertaining thing about today was the prioritizing process. It was easy at first, since managers and those who do the time-sensitive work obviously come first. That still leaves 85% or more of the office to be handled as best I can. (As of this writing, I have yet to finish off the broadcast studios or get anywhere near the Promotions Pit, a.k.a. Cthol Mishrak.)
My day rapidly devolved into a symphony of squeaky wheels, all begging me to dash to their cubicle right away because, after all, “I need to be able to print right now…” For the most part I obliged these noisemakers, but only if I wasn’t already elbows-deep in something of actual importance.
For instance, we had a spot of trouble with PowerMerge, an esoteric bit of radio software. That led to some frantic running around and a phone call to the guy in Florida who wrote the thing. Fixing the read-only status of some files turned the trick. Yay!
And then there’s the little problem between recent Netware 5.0 service packs and recent Win2K/XP Novell client versions. It has to do with caching, file locking and automatic reconnections, and it can bring a server to its knees. I, of course, have learned this the hard way. (Yes, I’ll be restarting the server in a little while.) We didn’t have a problem with the old server because I didn’t have it on the most recent (and, of course, highly recommended) service pack. Le sigh.
The vast majority of my coworkers showed great patience and expressed no small praise for my efforts. Hell, I even scored some goodies. Squeaky wheels they may be, but at least they’re generally nice and polite squeaky wheels. It wouldn’t have taken more than one or two negative nabobs to really ruin my whole day, so it’s only fair to express my thanks, even in a venue unread by most folks at the office.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll finish my lunch (yes, it is after six p.m., what’s your point?) and prepare to briefly down a server.
This is going to ramble incoherently. I’ve been at work for a bit more than 24 hours, so please bear with.
To sum up, I’ll tell you exactly what I just told everyone else:
If you can read this…
… congratulations on digging into your Start Menu and finding your Groupwise icon after fighting with the very-confused Novell login process.
Here’s the good news: The new server is alive and kicking, all data is intact, and the printers are apparently still happy on our network. And did you notice how much more quickly the login process goes without the anti-virus checker and the ZENworks launcher, not to mention that tedious wait to map the P: drive on the Snap server?
Here’s the bad news: ZENworks is gone. (You won’t feel the pain of it, but my workload may very well just have doubled, if not tripled.) I have only a few suspicions as to why it broke, but there’s nothing I can do about it now, and it was totally inevitable. Without ZENworks, we get no handy-dandy icons for things like Groupwise, Tapscan, Powerlink, CoolEdit 2000. So, someone (guess who?) will need to go from computer to computer to computer to computer manually placing icons for all of those programs.
Here’s the really bad news: If you want to print something, you’ll have to wait until someone (guess who?) can go from computer to computer to computer to computer, removing and then adding again your printers. (The quick, layman’s explanation is that your computer is looking in the wrong place for the printers.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go home and sleep after my 24-hour shift, the climax of four straight double-digit-hours working days. I’ll be here bright and early Tuesday morning, hopefully before many of you even have the chance to read this. At least you’ll understand why your computer’s acting so very strangely…
(ps – The observant among you will notice that I am indeed not coming in for a couple of days this holiday weekend. It’s for my mental health and yours. Trust me on this: we all want for me to be rested and recuperated on Tuesday morning.)
Overall, a qualified success. The printer thing is resolvable, albeit with a ton of tedious work. I’m just glad I didn’t have to actually reconfigure all of the print servers. As for the loss of ZENworks, well, I’m really going to feel it the next time something major needs to be rolled out to most of the building.
Right now, I’m just praying that the only phone calls I take between now and Tuesday are from friends, not co-workers. I need a break. Starting last Tuesday morning I’ve clocked 59 hours up to this point. Folks, that’s gotta be enough for a while. I’ll catch up with you again after some downtime.
Last night I rearranged a few things in the main server rack, and here’s the result:
Yes, that’s our new server. Two 18-gig drives, mirrored, live in the rightmost slots. Three 72-gig drives arranged RAID-5-style in the other occupied slots give us a roughly 130-gig storage array.
And the thing’s still the loudest machine in the room. Wow.
I’ve put in 13-hour days the last two days, with at least two more to go. Wish me luck.
I won’t bore you with the gory details (for a change). Suffice to say that the machine henceforth known as Tenchi is alive and accepting file transfers.
Yes, I named it Tenchi. (Sorry, Ben, but the Holy Grail Naming Scheme is now almost fully defunct.)
And now for a few late nights spent copying files and attempting to ensure that when I make the big switcheroo we won’t face immediate disaster. Wish me luck. Better yet, bring me snack food. Or just help keep me awake.
This morning the last of the hard drives arrived. Yippee! I gleefully unwrapped them, placed them into the Proliant DL380 chassis and tapped the Power button.
Let me state that the Proliant DL380 rackmount server is one of the noisiest chassis I’ve ever heard. It sounds like there’s a small aircraft experiencing engine trouble in my office.
After a couple of false starts (in other words, I tried to do things my way instead of the right way) I ran the SmartStart ™ CD-ROM and told the machine I wanted to install Netware 5.x.
But, you see, when the BIOS options says “Netware 5.x/6.0,” what it really means is “Netware 5.1/6.0,” and my copy of Netware 5.0 is system-non-grata.
Then I tried the so-called “manual” method, just booting from the Netware CD and letting things fly. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
That’s right, folks. It is impossible for Netware 5.0’s installer to recognize the array controller of a HP/Compaq Proliant DL380 G3. (Does Apple know that they’re using the “Gx” nomenclature, by the way?)
As things now stand, I’m sitting at my desk waiting for a quote from CDW on the cost of Netware 5.1 plus upgrade licenses for 150 connections. If the price tag doesn’t a) cause heart failures along Officer’s Row and/or b) get me fired, it’ll still be a couple of days before I can start on this project.
Again.
The best-case scenario, right now, is that I’m going to lose my Memorial Day weekend for this stupid project. I don’t want to think about the worst-case scenarios.
