Last week was interesting. We could sometimes reach our servers, and sometimes couldn't. I think as of today they have it pretty well fixed, but I'm sure something will come up with the number of changes that had to be made. Like all the pages I've been getting for the past 20 minutes probably mean something, especially since it was so quiet for the past day. I'm just glad that I can basically ignore it since my systems themselves stay up and I can't do anything about their connectivity.

I did get a lot of other stuff done though, like a bunch of mailing lists moved to the new server. With most of them people aren't even noticing the move, which is nice. Also lots more miscellaneous stuff, like reprogramming an alarm, talking to lots of people about stuff again, and generally dealing with the day to day stuff. I like Dave's response to what he does (as the same applies to both of us) - sit in an office and type all day. It sure is a lot simpler to explain.

Friday after work brought my sister over to get a bike and also went shopping at Sam's club. I picked up a few weeks worth of Dew, so shouldn't be running out for a bit. Saturday was sleep in and then try and ignore pages. Stuff broke again. I hear Doug worked most of the weekend, hopefully he gets a break now. Ross called me to invite me to a barbeque/bonfire, but I didn't feel like doing much of anything other than sitting around - I was still tired from the week. I did finish up Alias Season 2 though. Now I just have to watch Season 3 and I'll be caught up. I suppose I should get myth working again before Season 4 starts. I now have the box in the same closet as the HD tuner, so should be able to get better quality captures.

Sunday was church followed by sitting around the house all day. Basically trying to stay awake. I watched Identity, which was an interesting idea, but badly done. They start setting it up one way and it's really obvious it's gonna end with a reversal and yea... Can't really recommend based on the plot. If you're watching on a good system though, the sound is good, as well as the video cuts. While not having a great surround field, it has a lot of punch on the "surprises". That was followed by bringing in 4.5 gallons of Dew into the office so I don't have to carry it in later and mailing back the movie so I can get more sooner. Hmm. Mountain Dew Ice Cream. That actually sounds good.

Monday was sleep in day. Although it seems everyone forgot, at least at first. It was nice though. Stuff broke, and they fixed it, and I got to ignore it. Except when I couldn't get my email, that was sorta annoying. The mailing list server unsubscribed a ton of people today from one list I moved over. They had been bouncing ever since the migration. Apparently the old server just threw away the bounces and never bothered actually disabling or unsubscribing people. Hopefully this way we'll have less junk flying around the mail system long-term. Finally completely removed and reinstalled fink on my powerbook, so now I can install stuff. Got gimp up and running so I can edit pictures again. I have to say that it doesn't perform as well on large images as my linux box did. Then again, I normally seem to have problems with memory management on this box. There was a responsiveness glitch though. When changing layers and stuff and it had to swap things in from disk it'd take forever and the X11 interface doesn't seem to handle async very well. I wonder if it's based off older X code. Unfortunately that happened quite a bit. It warned me though that the image file was too big when I created it - I probably just need to tweak the settings a bit. It doesn't like when you get more than 11 million pixels or so in the image. Finished off the evening by watching Count of Monte Cristo, which was OK, followed by Rising Sun. It's been a bit over 10 years since I read the book (back in my reading every Michael Chichton book I could get my hands on phase), but I have to say when they say "based on the book" in this case it's pretty loose. They kept the general plot, but seem to have dropped half the investigation. Oh well, after seeing what they did to Jurassic Park, Congo, and Sphere, and especially Lost World, shouldn't be too surprised... I wonder what's in store for tomorrow.

The week finished off pretty well. Nothing too exciting during the actual work week. Had some discussions with people about stuff, will probably have to follow up, but hopefully things will get better (the number of things that applies to from this weekend is amazing - probably everything you're thinking of and a few more). Also talked to Carlos again. That car wasn't stolen - it was just some idiot who didn't know how to treat a vehicle he owned properly. Oh well, I'm just glad I don't have to deal with it.

Saturday morning stuff blew up. Resulted in some power outages. Then more stuff blew up. Bethel ran off generators. Then they overheated, and there was another outage. That one wasn't bad, as it was less than an hour and we have a bit over an hour of runtime in each server room on batteries. But then there was another one for a few more hours, and that took out both server rooms. That outage occured Sunday morning. Brent and I both stopped in before church and got a few core things up and running. Doug apparently spent a bit more time and got most of the network up and running too. After church Brent and I spent a good chunk of the day getting everything else up and running, and it seemed to be going good. There were a few network oddities, but they were the type that go away over time as it figures stuff out.

At least until Sunday night. I kept noticing that my ssh sessions were lasting shorter and shorter times before dying (I tunnel all my email traffic through SSH normally - yea, call me a paranoid nutcase or whatever). Around midnight I finally went in because stuff wasn't working and the routers were seeing high load. It looked liked some sort of worm like last year, and now looking back on the patterns I'm guessing it's probably RBOT. Of course the fact that there was tons of broadcast traffic managed to upset the already confused switches even more, and DNS was effectively unreachable from portions of the network. This included one of the email servers resulting in some email starting to bounce. Managed to shut that down, but stuff just started to segment more and more. Finally just basically tried to get stuff mainly working, paged network services (or attempted to page - the pages got stuck in the system), and called it good. I think I got to bed around 4.

Monday afternoon Nick got back in town, and called me to say he was having a bonfire as well as ask what was up. I told him and he ended up picking me up and we went in to work. Ended up rebooting the entire core of the network a few times, removed some redundant network links to help improve the chances of stability, fixed the problem with most of the campus switches trying to get to the VLAN management server, and ended up rebooting the main DNS and DHCP server. Then we had to attempt to get everything to learn about everything else again, and switch to running in a normal state. Part of that involved trying to get all the switches to know the true location of the servers (since before they were seeing them all over). And Brent had to fix a couple things that were really broken too (and I had to power cycle one of those systems). Dave had to fix printing too, but that happened later. After the bonfire that Nick and I finished up just in time to leave for.

The bonfire was good though. We even got Paul to actually leave the Help Desk and come visit. Nick had to call him stuff first though. Burning wood, sticky half-melted fluffy-puffs, and a bunch of cell phones beeping constantly with pages we were just ignoring ("hey x is down now, that's too bad") have a way of helping everyone relax. Other than that I watched the first three DVDs of Alias Season 2 (minus the first episode I watched Thursday), and sat around the house. So how did you relax for labor day weekend? :)