I was dreading Monday all night last night, for various reasons… one of which actually did come to pass. But I’m not here to talk about the personal stuff… not today anyway.
My workday was deceptively mild for a Monday, until midafternoon. Then I got a call from one of the salesdudes who fancies himself something of a computer expert. He took his usual pleasure in informing me that the email server seemed to have “taken a crap,” in his pithy phrasing. Unfortunately he was right, but it was kinda weird: The server itself was ticking along as fine as you please, no indication given whatsoever that anything was even the slightest bit out of the ordinary. But since nobody could connect to it, a rebooting was in order nonetheless. Even afterward I couldn’t determine what had gone wrong.
But that wasn’t the worst of things, not by half. The last of the three “events” of my day landed just a few minutes before five o’clock… the main fileserver fell over.
Yes, that’s a technical term. Go look it up if you must.
I spent three solid hours of intense frustration fighting to get that machine back online. The alternative was to wipe the machine clear and start over… with no backup of the valuable metadata that actually makes my network run. You know, little things like user accounts, passwords, groups, print queues, application objects, permissions. Who needs all that nonsense, right? *cough*
Historically speaking, I’ve experienced great results by searching Novell’s support site when I have problems with one of their products. Not this time, though. While I learned to work around some of the symptoms, I couldn’t find a cure. Until, of course, I turned back to good old Google. In the past, Google searches usually found me a bunch of Usenet posts along the lines of, “What are you doing here, moron? Go to Novell’s support site!” This time, I found the one vital piece of information needed to bring everything back online with one changed setting.
See, unbeknownst to me an important SLP setting was at its default of 2 when it should have been changed to 4.
It was that simple. The scary part is that nobody seems to know what the “2” and “4” settings do. It just works that way.
I know my job involves what most folks think of as arcane gibberish, but please! I like to actually understand the settings I’m changing! Is that so wrong? Is it?
Oh well. I came home, went shopping for lunch stuffs and also snagged some comfort food to make my night go better. Tomorrow had better damned well be a better day that this was. Bleah.
