So here’s how it went down. The email server, that is.

I discovered a few weeks ago that one of the mirrored drives in the email server had died, probably quite some time ago. Nothing major, it was just one of the pair of drives that stored every email message for Entercom Portland. With the volume nearly at capacity, I figured that instead of replacing the one dead drive we could double the capacity while getting back that mirroring we’re so fond of.

The drives arrived last week. I didn’t want to try my luck with the remaining drive any longer than necessary, so yesterday became “replace hard drives in email server” day.

But it’s never just that easy, is it? First I had to find a place to put all of that data. Ah, the old 34-gigabyte partition on the main fileserver. Next, how to transfer it. Just drag and drop on the admin workstation, piece of cake! Wrong. Windows 2000 and Netware sometimes play poorly together. The first few megabytes of data transfered quickly, then it dropped to an absolute crawl. We’re talking a few dozen kilobytes every few seconds.

To hell with that. Plan B was to use Mihoshi, one of my handy-dandy Linux boxes. For all that she’s running a tired old copy of RedHat 6.2, she’s still got some life in her. Long story shorter, Mihoshi ran the file copy just fine.

Of course, it was still 17 gigabytes of data over the wire, so it took a few hours. About seven of them. I wrote, I moved a salesperson from one cubicle to another (don’t ask), I chatted with supercool people.

So it came up on 6pm and I could finally start swapping drives. It was over the next two hours that I learned something. I learned that Compaq is evil. Did you know that you cannot simply replace a hard drive in a Compaq server? Oh no, you can’t. You have to run the array configuration utility with the bad drive still in place so you can tell the array that you’re not going to use that drive anymore.

Idiots.

I finally got the new drives in, again, and the server was happy. Mihoshi leaped into action to put back all the files she’d taken off of the server just hours before. This of course took another few hours, though oddly not as many as on the outbound transfer.

The restoration transfer completed at 1:37am. I didn’t bother running ‘rsync’ to double-check the transfer, I just fired up the Groupwise server modules. Luckily for me it worked perfectly.

After that I just hung out and cranked out NaNo word-count until a bit before 5:00 when the first busses were heading out of downtown. By the way, it was colder than a penguin’s backside out there at 4:45am. Oh yeah.

And now I’m at home. I got a few hours of sleep in, but Hannah is due to arrive any minute now and there’s just no way I’m going to have any peace while she’s here. Cute kid, but loud. Did I mention that her favorite word is “mine”? Ah well, she’ll grow out of that. I hope.

So at the end of a long, frustrating day at work (cubicle reassignments, short tempers, big-shot new salespersons, managerial short-sightedness) how fun is this:

I round the corner, computer chassis in hand, and look at the new decorations on the window of the Traffic department’s office. Big sheets of white paper with drawings and numbers all in red. Ah, they’re goal thermometers for three of the sales teams. You’ve seen them before, nothing special about them… Wait a minute. They’re kind of… wide. And the mercury bulbs are shaped… oddly.

And as these thoughts cross my brain, the KKSN/KRSK Sales Manager calls out, “Those are thermometers, right Karel?”

“Um… no they aren’t, Steve!”

That’s right, folks. The goal charts for Kisn, Rosey and Sunny are big red penises.

The poor unfortunate lady in the Traffic department who sits in that corner of the office has already stuck things to her side of the window to obscure the, ah, view. Later on the much-put-upon Traffic folks and I had a good laugh about how this proves that the Sales department is just a bunch of dicks.

There are worse ways to end a long week of work than to share a laugh with your coworkers, especially if other coworkers provided the joke.