Computers, and why did I choose to do this for a living?

Oh my god, what a week. I’ve been so busy at work.

We had two servers go down on Friday, well one didn’t officially go down, I killed it. My boss told me to, really.

We need a development server to test out a new version of cold fusion (I’m just going to assume that you don’t know what I’m talking about but I’m going to say it anyway.). Paul told me to use this server that we’ve had since I got there 7+ years ago. So I wiped it and started over. Got a nice new install of windows 2003 and the developer’s version of Cold Fusion installed only to find out that Paul had put a production instance of Sharepoint on it. This wouldn’t be so bad but the person that was using it is coming up with a big dead-line and needs it back up. It has agendas for our spring meeting that starts in a couple of weeks. People log in and then make changes and then save it back. Up-to-date agendas that can be changed on the fly. People love it.

The other server I thought might have the instance of Sharepoint on it so I rebooted it to see if it would fix the problem. What you need to know here is that I didn’t set up Sharepoint, Paul did, so I had no idea where all its parts where. When I rebooted it, it didn’t come back. Dead, gone, ciao, bye bye. More work for me.

I’m at work until 9PM on Friday because of this little mishap, and guess what, it didn’t get it fixed.

Once again it wouldn’t be so bad working on the weekend but it’s the nicest weekend we’ve had in DC since last year. Absolutely gorgeous, the last thing I wanted to do was be stuck in a server room all weekend.

Luckily it was just Sunday that I went in. We had gone to Rob and Mikko’s on Friday night after I had gotten back from work and stayed there until about 3 that morning. Saturday I wasn’t in the mood for going into work at all. I did go to the circle with Dave and enjoyed the weather. We went to dinner and just had a great day together. Just what the doctor ordered.

I did go in for about 5 hours on Sunday and it still didn’t get fixed. I tried everything, and everything didn’t work. I do have a backup of all the data, the problem was the data didn’t want to get restored over the network. I ended up installing the backup software on a new install of windows 2003 and then attaching the tape drive to the server. This was great except that when I tried to restore it said I had to catalogue the tapes. Little did I know that it takes about 5 hours to do that? So I get fed up with the whole process and meet Dave in the circle again. I figure it can wait until today.

Dave and I go for a nice late lunch (4PM) and then head home only to be hijacked to JR’s until about 9 by Kiat. Boy was it was crowded! We had fun but it always proves to me why we spend most of our Sundays away from that place when we get up on a Monday morning. I’ll put it this way, we were both just a little bit slow this morning.

I did get to work and did a restore on the first server. I figure it’s best to do one at a time so I don’t screw something up. I did the restore following the instructions that the software gave me. It was working and I was so happy. And then it came time to reboot the server to finish the restore.

Booting,

Booting,

Windows starts.

Windows starts.

Windows starts.

Rebooting.

Rebooting.

Windows starts, kinda

Over and over again it goes without the Server really starting up. WTF?? I followed the instruction completely to a tee.

Ok, install windows over the restore and do a recovery.

Spend the rest of the afternoon reinstalling all the software from scratch. Restore the Databases. If I didn’t mention it this was a SQL Database server used for testing out web aps. Finally get the server up at around 4 today.

And I still have the other server to do tomorrow. It did the same booting, windows starting thing above after I restored to it too. Hopefully it’ll be nicer to me tomorrow.

Time to cook dinner now, I have a hungry tired looking boyfriend across the dining table from me now. More to come soon.