So why did my Friday go directly to hell at noon?

1) The Entercom WAN network went completely down at about ten minutes past noon, Pacific time. It didn’t come back until nearly 5:00, at which time we finally learned that a Worldcom router had failed and caused the whole mess. For five crucial hours on a Friday afternoon we couldn’t get commercials downloaded for air, let alone emails in and out of the building. Imagine the joy.

(Geeky side note: My proxy server scheme doesn’t work without a local DNS server, since everyone is told via DHCP to get DNS lookups from the Corporate office… an impossibility when the frame cloud is down. So I spent a couple of hours installing a dinky little caching nameserver. Next time I’ll be ready… if I can figure out where in Netware 5’s DHCP system you configure the nameserver info.)

2) The Beast, our standby Enco fileserver, died. Or, rather, one of its hard drives died. This happened a few days ago, but I only routinely check up on the box about once a week. We have to order a replacement IDE drive in the 75 gigabyte range, then strap it in, power up the machine and configure a brand new RAID 0 array. Then I get to spend the following 48 hours copying data from the main Enco server. Yippee, ha ha, whee. Right now The Beast is on my workbench, missing a hard drive. So much for getting anything else done, like prepping the new PD Streaming box for Kansas City… or rolling out another Compaq (I’ve only done five so far!) or… well, much of anything.

(Side note: I did get to spend about an hour playing “spot delivery boy,” since I had one of the few computers with a working Internet connection. Proud to serve, I am. And it was kind of fun. Call me weird.)

And now I think I’ll go home and vegetate. And eat. And play games. Then I’ll come back on Sunday and get the work done I was supposed to do today…

(Another side note, for the hell of it: So, is that enough posting for one day? Does it make up for the “lack thereof” during the rest of the week? I sure as hell hope so. Really now.)

There, I’m done. See you tomorrow. Or Sunday.

(One last side note: I added two new links to the blogroll. Moody In The Rain is Celina’s journal, and I put Hey! in as well. I’m all about Oregon thingie-ers. What, you want me to call ’em “bloggers?” Anyway… Visit and enjoy.)