travis' brain dump

so… just over a year later, we’re back again with the ring of death story…

i was so ready to settle down and play some nice FFXI with andy when BAM! it’s back to haunt me all over again… funny how this happened just over a year from the last time….  (360 DOWN!) at least this time around it’s still covered thanks to Microsoft placing a 3-year warranty on this specific error. hopefully we’ll see some improvement with the new setup they have for heat displacement. *crosses fingers*

So… just and FYI.

If you’re subscribed and you’ve got a hotmail/msn account that you’re using to get your emails from this server… it won’t work. 🙁

Evidently the entire block of IP addresses that this server happens to be on has been blocked by MSN/Hotmail for suspicious spam/virus related activity. After reviewing the logs, it appears that all is well on this server as it has been for years however just a few addresses up the ladder, my former company’s mail server has somehow peed in someone’s wheaties and has gotten the whole subnet added to the list of hate out there.

Kinda lame if you ask me considering that blocking a whole subnet is stupid IMHO. You should only blacklist the IP in question, not all his neighbors. That’s like arresting an entire neighborhood of people because the guy down the street is dealing drugs to elementary school kids.

I think someone at Microsoft needs to be looking for their helmet. 🙂

Yes, for those of you who are not interested, read no further. LOL

M.O.M. or Microsoft Operations Manager can be a useful and valuable tool… when used correctly. But what good is an installation of MOM if it’s not doing anything?

With the smoke still clearing from the storm I caused at the last place I was at in followup to my post about taking pride in your job, I have found myself looking down the barrell of a similar gun. What do these people do all day? I mean seriously.

I come into this place with a few tasks… work on the event’s management software and MOM. Those are my two tasks. What do I find? No mails being sent from any of the monitoring software because the McAfee policy is blocking the executables from sending out mails to tell you there are problems out on your network and last but not least the MOM database server is FULL!!!!! (not to mention it is full of alerts from almost over 700 days ago too…) *sigh*

Seriously folks… Why is it people like myself have such a hard time getting jobs when we’re looking (thankfully not the case with this job I’m at right now) and yet people in these jobs are worthless. I’m not going to judge the person I’m filling in for… It appears the guy has way too much to do but allowing your monitoring server to go down in flames isn’t exactly keeping on top of your job. *shrug* Maybe it’s not on his priority list… maybe he’s a slacker… maybe there really is just too much going on for him and he can’t keep up with it.

Whatever the case may be, this is two for two people. Twice I’ve been put in front of someone’s network and twice I’ve found it’s neglected and screwed up. At least it’s something productive to do while I’m working on some permanent work. 🙂

I need to get back to the over abundance of shrinking of databases that need done here, just figured I’d rant.

late

So I get a phone call this morning from a friend of mine at a landscaping company… evidently during the move of their primary server something went awry… The system no longer wanted to boot up and was complaining profusely. I made time as quickly as I could to come down to fix them up and much to my surprise when I arrived found that the worst case scenario was staring me in the face.

The system had been rebooted during bootup… One of the drives in the RAID array was showing as missing/failed and the state of the entire RAID volume was being listed as ‘ failed ‘ … uh oh … I would have happily taken a sign that the volume was running in a diminished capacity but this thing was ANGRY. Somehow by all grace I was able to bring the volume up into a rebuild state, but it was still unhappy, so I installed another disk to boot from and load up some utilities. The array went about its rebuilding just as happy as could be… After taking an hour or two to do so, I was able to then try to run CheckDisk on the partitions. The OS partition went pretty well, but the Data partition was all jacked up…. time to call in data recovery software… *fingers crossed* Currently it’s doing a sector scan of the drive and is at 38%… I’ve been at this 6 hours now. I’m hoping for some good news after this and hopefully be able to restore the financial files at the very least. Anything else on top of those is just icing on the cake.

I tell ya. This kinda stuff scares me. I’ve been put in this position two other times and it was uncomfortable then as it is now. It always sucks when you’ve got to do your best to restore what you can but in the end, regardless you have to hand them a pretty hefty bill no matter how much data you recovered. *shudder* I guess this little instance will nudge them towards some better practices in data backup. A positive in all of this. Let’s just hope it’s not at the expense of losing financial data. 🙁

43% – It’s picking up some speed. Well here’s hopin for a good report at the end of this… I’ll post up more later as I think I’m going to be at this a while. After I recover data, I have to reinstall the entire server. Then it’s rejoin the domain time for all the workstations which happen to be offsite so that’s going to have to wait until next week I think. (not sure when they are moving the rest of the workstations over here)

Cross your fingers for these guys folks, they’re gonna need it.