Bad day, California here I come

Yesterday was a nightmare at work. I had to do the most involved and annoying server recovery I ever tackled. It is the PDC of our Windows domain. On Friday it was restarted and hung on the restart. The NCR tech was supposed to be there first thing at open of business but we got a call that he didn’t receive the call until Monday morning and had no parts. I asked him to come in anyway to see if we could get it going and at the very least, accurately determine what parts would be needed. In retrospect it would have been just as easy without him. He had few good ideas and scarce knowledge of the hardware. During his experiments he managed to corrupt the data mirror, leaving no recovery option for me beyond a tape restore from Thursday night. But no matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the server to a point where I could even access the drives to reinstall Windows 2000. Eventually the service call turned into me on the phone working with NCR level 2 support while the onsite tech stood around with his hands in his pockets. Eventually we got the server to the point where I could start reloading windows and I told the tech he could head out. So I had to reload windows from scratch and then restore data remotely usng BackupExec. However once the server rebooted it hung. The boot.ini had incorrect parameters so I had to go to the recovery console and fix that. Once the server came up there were about a half a dozen other issues I had to weed out and knock down. It was complicated because the server was the PDC and had been off for a few days, so it screwed up some aspects of active directory. One of the fixes used a tool that directly modified AD. In the notes it advised to only use the tool under direct orders from a MSFT rep and how using the tool incorrectly could DESTROY active directory. I carefully followed the instructions and hit the ENTER key hesitantly, but was relieved to see it worked as it was supposed to. I then had to fix issues with RPC connections and finally fix an issue where the Exchange database would not restore correctly. It was truly a nightmare fix and I didn’t get out of the office until after 7pm, having worked on the issue basically the entire day. Throughout the day I went through many feelings of stress, frustration, anger and finally elation when the last bug was squashed. Many times throughout the day I reminded myself things could be much worse, I could be in New Orleans.

We had some points left in our timeshare account that we would lose if we didn’t use, so we decided to put them towards a trip around our Anniversary in October. We decided to go somewhere different, Palm Springs in southern California. I always wanted to see southern cal and this will be my shot. We plan to use Palm Springs as our base but also spend time in the Hollywood/LA and San Diego area. The airfare out there was suprisingly reasonable. Our only major anxiety of course revolves around the pooch, we need to make arrangements for her care and at this point are unsure of what direction we will go.