techrecovery | Aug. 25th, 2008

Last night was one of those Sunday nights I went to bed just dreading the kind of Monday it was going to be today, and I was right.

7:45 - get phone call from client I did a file migration onto a SAN late Friday for. Everything looks great! Wonderfull, I'll check in later. Stop calling my cell phone.
8:00 - arrive onsite at the Traffic Engineers place. Yup, the server in their NY office is still down. No, my NY office hasn't sent anyone over to check it out. Oh, they can't until Friday? Excellent. I'll just take the Fung Wah down and reboot it myself shall I?
9:00 - engineer drops a box of software in my lap. Can you install that on the server? Oh, it's got a dongle key? Sweet. I wonder if there's still enough USB ports on the server with all the other dongle keys on there.
9:15 - get phone call from SAN client while crawling under an engineer's desk hooking up a PC. Everything's read-only on the filesystem. Nobody can work.
9:30 - 11:00 - write scripts to restore file permissions on remote SAN while fending off more requests from engineers. Can that dongle software be installed today?
11:30 - settle down SAN situation. Start looking at actual task list for traffic engineers.
12:01 - prepare to leave site, get pulled aside from HR person. She can't get into the Intranet, it's rejecting her password. The Intranet that was written in shitty ASP 4 years ago by the former onsite IT person we replaced and have no documentation about and the owners are too cheap to re-engineer.
13:00 - get HR person logged in finally, call office to advise my next client I'll be late, duck into Pita Kabob to grab a chicken kabob pita, the highlight of my day.
13:15 - 14:00 - drive madly while eyeing the check engine light and wondering if the wobble in the tires is due to alignment or the engine about to quit. Spill chicken kabob on slacks. Mmm, feta.
14:05 - Walk into the environmental engineer's site. Let's see, what are we doing today? Oh yes, ripping out Symantec Antivirus and replacing it with a package I've never used before.
14:05 - 14:15 - read documentation for Kaspersky antivirus while writing script to uninstall Symantec on workstations. Hmm, this should call for about 2 server reboots and 3 workstation reboots each. Could be worse.
14:15 - 14:30 - look briefly at the queue of messages awaiting me on our Intranet. Immediately close browser.
14:30 - 14:35 - swear at Symantec.
14:45 - get call from SAN people. The content management system isn't working either. Did you check the permissions? Not yet? Please go do that and call me back. Or better, use the script I just emailed you to fix them yourself.
15:05 - call from health care ASP. AT&T's backbone to Medicare is down. They gave the AT&T engineers my number in case they had an questions. Oh, we may have to reroute all the Medicare processing traffic to another VPN tunnel. Would you mind just calling them to do that?
15:05 - 16:30 - run from workstation to workstation trying to figure out why Kaspersky AV won't install. Symantec AV left pieces of itself all over the place. Quel suprise!
16:30 - 17:00 - give up on scripting and manually root through the Registry cleaning out AV. Owner hands me a list of 8 remote workers that are going to be need to individually called and remoted in to so we can change out their AV. Shoot the list over to the office. We actually have someone available on Friday that can do it. Amazing.
17:05 - 18:00 - resolve last of installation issues. Spend a while with tech-savvy owner who wants to know every detail about why Kaspersky is throwing up warnings or bleepign and blooping about this or that thing. Resist urge to tell him I only have three hours' experience with the product.
18:30 - pull out of Walpole, stop by local sub shop to pick up a crappy sub for dinner, drive home eyeing my 'check engine' light.

Thank God the last 3 days of the week I'll be on a single project.