(no subject)

[falconeio.livejournal.com]

How hard is it to tell someone that your computer is making really weird grinding noises. Well it seems where I work It is extremely hard. For a week the computer was grinding away and they finally inform me of this once it goes silent. So now I need to spend tomorrow rushing around to purchase a new power supply since they need the comp back up tomorrow and I have no spares of that size power supply. Plus to make matters worse the damn thing was so coated with dust since they had been cleaning the last two weeks that I'm coated in the stuff and got burned when I first touched the back of the computer. But that wasn't the clincher, what really got to me is that the director of that deparment wanted me to and I quote 'Just pull the power supply of the fan on the wall and use that' ARGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH

Hell in a handbasket...

[agentz.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad today's over...

For the last couple of weeks I've been working on this years school ICT equipment bulk capital purchase - around half a million pounds worth of stuff. Trying to collate all the requests from the schools is a total nightmare. We provided them with a menu of about 11 Apple and Dell configurations and some other assorted hardware such as printers, wireless access points, projectors, interactive whiteboards and the like, but a number of the returns were a mess and a surprising number of schools can't add up figures! And to top that off we've got some extra funding which schools can bid of a proportion of. Myself and another couple of members of the project team have been working 12 hour days this week to try and get as much of the purchase organised as quickly as possible so we can concentrate on the next stages.

On top of that the schools email system which I'm responsible for administering (Symantec MailGear running on Solaris) has been up the creek for the last three and a half days. There are somewhere in the region of 30,000 users on the system and none of them have been able to get at their mail since Monday late afternoon. So my job queue is through the roof just now.

Also, one of our secondary schools has lost a large chunk of its network - the PDC lost two of the three SCSI drives in its RAID something-or-other array which put it out of commission. And I heard someone say that one of the BDC's at the same site is reporting a processor or mainboard failure. Great.

As if that wasn't bad enough, I got in to the office at 8.15 this morning and noticed that my machine was really slow to boot. Eventually got logged in to our domain and opened up Outlook to access my Exchange mailbox to find that our Exchange server was also down.

Then one of my colleagues appears at my door and tells me that he hasn't got any web access. Get my browser open and can get as far as our proxy server but it cannot connect to anything external to us. Hmm, thats odd. Change my proxy settings to our other corporate proxy and get the same result. Change again to one of our school proxy servers and get exactly the same result again. Damn. OK so as well as having 30,000 users without email access I now have the same number of users without web access too. Turns out that the Solaris box that handles forward proxy requests (IIRC our network topology correctly this box sits between the central proxy and the firewall) had also fallen over. And it just so happens that this is the same box that is queuing all the school email while our MailGear server is fubar'd.

Then one of our primary internal DNS servers falls over so people all over the building start to experience really odd behaviour, and it meant that I had problems getting reconnected to the helpdesk system. Gah.

All of this before 8.45 this morning. I had a project team meeting scheduled from 1pm - 2pm today and it ran over. It damn well ran until 6.15pm. Only 4 and a bit hours over. I feel an exception report coming on.

Did I mention I hate Symantec MailGear?