The tragic thing is, I cared more about the election in someone else's country than in my own. Not a lot mind you. But it does seem like a bit of a blow for world peace.

Had a thoroughly sucky afternoon at work. Got myself into trouble with the boss because I assumed somebody knew something they didn't and they found out badly and he had to clean up the mess. I'm going to have to share an office with someone who I really don't want to. This is a guy that spends his entire day browsing hifi equipment, music, australian idol and other such stuff on the internet all day. I honestly cannot tell you what he's *supposed* to do with his today. Technically he's the backup administrator. But he's not even very good at that. And now he's going to be even further from supervision, and the fact that he doesn't work all day is just going to stress me out. sigh.

The only thing I achieved today was getting closer to getting file replication working. But really need to test it with gigabytes of files rather than just half a dozen empty directories.

Watching Air Crash Investigation. I've actually seen this episode before, although no idea where. Probably at Vic's place on Foxtel or something.

After two nights of broken sleep thanks to cia's servers, I'm going to turn the pagers off and sleep through. Maybe then tomorrow won't be as sucky as today was.

I think I had just about the worst day of my career today. On Saturday morning during the first of the raid container rebuilds the file system on the file server decided to get corrupted. But of course with very few people accessing the server we didn't know about it until this morning, when one group of users couldn't get to their directory at all. After we checked the event logs and saw what was happening we thought we should do an emergency shutdown and chkdsk so that the affected users might be able to do some work that day. However the server decided it wanted to reset the permissions on every file on the server. All one million of them. After two and a half hours and 150000 files we decided we'd risk losing everything and reboot out of it. The server came back up, but all the file permissions were utterly screwed.

So while everything was so fubar, we decided to go back to the ultra 160 emm card and cable, because we knew that they at least worked. Plus dropping back to 160 from 320 we may eliminate some of the flakyness in the raid containers.

So after replacing the card and rebooting, it was then a matter of resetting all the permissions. Fortunately I'd only recently done a bunch of permissions scripts and consolodation of our documentation, so it wasn't such a difficult thing to reset all the permissions on the box to what they should be. But it did take many hours.

I still have a few major directories to go, and then I have to figure out which files were corrupted and try and restore those from last week's backup tapes.

The irony of all of this is, the backup tonight is running faster than it's ever run before on the new server. And this is on a "slower" emm card. Which may tend to suggest a problem with the 320 emm card or the new cable. Who knows. Dell certainly don't. Before all of this started I talked to them this morning, and they were going to escalate it to their second level support. Well they called back this afternoon and I kinda let them have it somewhat. Well not badly, I just told them what I'd gone through all day and that we'd gone back to the old card. He offered to send out a tech and I said well that would be somewhat difficult on a production server to "fiddle". I want to get the machine settled a bit more, and have some sort of way to recover to another machine if necessary. This of course involves buying another server, and replication software that I haven't had time to research yet :/ Blah.

Urgh. What a horrible day. It's the biggest unplanned outage I've ever had at work. Very distressing.

I was going to go to bed, but I have this urge to watch the backup finish, so watching Peter Pan to recover my mood somewhat.

Chucked for the first time in two years from alcohol tonight.. not a good thing

Bought three new fish yesterday for the big tank.. one dead already, two sick, transferred them to the tetra tank... v.bad.. cursed tank at the moment it seems .. :(

crash time..

So the file server went live Sunday night.

This afternoon one of the disks in the array decided to disconnect itself from the array. No reason. It just didn't want to play anymore. So I pulled it out, plugged it back in, and it started rebuilding.

Now this is a 7x146gb disk array, and rebuilding a single disk takes hours. 30 of them at the current rate.

If we lose another disk before it's done (which is more likely to happen than not, given that there was no apparent error, it just felt like doing it). And then several hundred people will be pissed off at losing all their days work since the last backup, not to mention not having access to the rest of their files while we figure out how to get everything back for them without a working disk array.

I am absolutely terrified about what could happen between now and tomorrow night. It's the level of stress I could really do without.

Going to get up at 2am after the current backup job is finished and crank up the rebuild rate and hope it can rebuild itself before work hours tomorrow.

FQ1: What is the biggest fear you've had to face? Now that it's over, would it scare you to confront it again?
Having to rebuild a production commercial web server in the middle of the night when it died in a heap.
Beyond belief.

FQ2: What is your greatest fear that you've not yet met? If you were paid loads of money, would you willingly face it?
Having my house burnt down.
Never. I'm the sort of person that gets attached to inanimate objects, and I get distressed when I lose them.

FQ3: What is something most people are afraid of, but you don't have a problem with? Why do you think that is?
Dying.
I know I'm going to heaven, which will be a helluva lot better than being on earth

FQ Movie Night: Your readers are looking for a thrill! What's the scariest scene from a movie you've ever seen?
Friday the 13th. It scarred me for life. It didn't help that I was 11 when I saw it.
Oh I just reread that - scariest *scene* .. um.. the worst one from Friday the 13th was where Jason squeezes someone's skull til it pops and the eyeballs pop out.

I never did write up my ski trip. It's kinda getting past it now.

The trip down Monday night felt long. Didn't help that I was still feeling a bit sick. Arrived well after midnight and simply crashed out. Was in mixed rooms which I'd never done before with strangers, so that was kinda weird. Then stressed over how long I'd have to wait for a shower in the morning. As it turned out, noone was in the other room, and I ended up having first shower.

Day one on the snow was very average. It was snowing which was a good thing, except for the fact that I was getting snow on my goggles, which was melting and sitting there as big droplets which prevented me seeing anything. That combined with so much snow in the air that I really couldn't see a thing, and didn't have a very good day skiing. At higher altitudes it was a like a freezing blizzard, so I didn't get much out of the front valley area of Perisher. Got taken out by a damned snowboarder who mustn't have been watching where he was going, and still have massive bruises on my arms to show for it. Not to mention having to go to the toilet repeatedly to clear the bowels of whatever made me sick the other day. Fell over quite a few times on day one and was very tired by the end of the day. Basically just had dinner and crashed early.

Day two was perfect sunny conditions, fresh snow, much better all around. Decided to dump my bag in a locker after taking some photos, and fared much better for it. Headed over to Blue Cow and had lots of fun on the Pleasant Valley run. Wandered back to meet Tamlin and Frederico for lunch, before heading back again. Didn't fall over at all after dumping the bag and had a ball as I started getting better at skiing again. Got a relatively early night after pulling out of the pool competition (they kept adding more games to round one so I'd never get to my second game).

Day three was another perfect day. Went straight up to Blue Cow with the camera and took pictures all over. Then dumped the bag again and went straight back. Headed over to Guthega, but they had a lift problem and ended up with massive queues. Was all set to head back to Blue Cow but the queues cleared somewhat and I did several of the blue runs without too much trouble. Then did the summit express chair which I'd never been on before, although the conditions were a little icy. Finally headed back to Mt Perisher to do some of the runs there, and the highest lifted point in Australia. I didn't stop for lunch on the third day, because there were too many runs to do and not enough time to do them! Really didn't want to come home by the end of the third day, because I was really starting to get the hang of things again. I didn't even fall over at all on the last day! Now have to wait at least another year :/

I can recommend Oz Snow Adventures. They were fairly well organised, all the transportation and accommodation was organised without any glitches. Everything was as described on the website, and booking was very low fuss. The only thing I really didn't like was the mixed rooms, but even that wasn't really a big drama.

Will get some photos up on conspiracy eventually.

I actually think I have closer to 100 baby kribs. But it's rather hard to count them.

Josh and Rachel just got axolotls for Josh's birthday, but one of them has fungus on its gills, probably from stress from the big ammonia spike. Have given them some of my filter wool which should hopefully have bacteria in it to break down the ammonia a bit quicker than just letting it happen by itself.

Man I'm tired, and it's only Wednesday :/

I am the world's worst procrastinator. If the first step in doing something is the slightest bit difficult that thing just does not get done. So it was with some notes programming I had to do. This task had been hanging over my head literally *all year* because every time I thought about it I thought "urghh" (literally!). Well after fixing the thing I fixed yesterday I was without much left todo, so asked my boss what I should do next. (This in itself is always a dangerous thing to do, because he will always allocate the stuff that I've been trying to put off as long as possible). The response of course was this horrible notes job. As it turned out however, the task wasn't too complicated or even difficult, and I had it done within an hour or two. So all those months of stressing over this stupid job, and it was over and done with in an hour. How tragic is that? I really should tackle other such jobs, both at work and at home, with the same gusto...!

I can't sleep. Lying awake stressing over what a pack of criminal bastards ebay is.

So downloaded the last two weeks of photos I somehow hadn't gotten around to doing.

Tradition has it that I photograph my friends new cars the day they get them. Well when I was away, I lent my car to James for six weeks. They got so used to be a two-car family that today they went and bought a new second car. Scary really. And it's all my fault.

I think also the fact that I have to get up early means I can't get to sleep tonight.

My weekend went something like this:

Saturday:
get up
stress over fish tank
setup new fish tank for kribs
relatively lazy afternoon
go to parents for dinner
get home
go out to party in town

Sunday:
go to party
get home
go to bed
get up
go to church
get home
put on a load of washing
go out to lunch
get home
hang out washing
go out to dinner
get home
crash

If I had the energy I'd talk about the "interesting" events of last night's party, the 25 minute wait for a train there but a 5 minute wait for a bus home, the fact that Chris has recently become single again, the four hours sleep, the nice lunch with David and Yvonne, and the nice dinner with Ric. I have eaten so much today it's ridiculous. And on that note, I'm going to bed.