Trying to stay awake
Elena's on her way over since she just got out of work and I need to be awake to let her in, since she's got no cell phone to call to tell me she's here. I must stay vigilant in my watch by the window for her car to pull up. I figure, what better way to keep myself awake than to type and continue to bitch about the week of work that I've had?
Thankfully Brett gave me a call tonight and asked if I wanted to get a bite to eat. His fiance was working so he was all by his lonesome as well, so we headed to John Harvard's for some good food and of course, the good beer, although I was the only one partaking in it (He slipped a disc in his back and is on some type of medication that he shouldn't mix with alcohol. Poor bastard, plus he can be a little bit of a hypochondriac, so everything thats wrong with him is life ending). So I'm feeling good after the beer intake.
I'm hoping I don't have to go into work tomorrow. We've been hacing some serious issues with our SAN at work. In geek-speak a SAN is a Storage Area Network, which is basically this box full of high speed hard drives that 5 servers connect to for data and application storage. A lot of stuff has been put on that SAN since we've brought it online, which was during my tenure, including 75% of the companies e-mail, a good chunk of all the various SQL databases we use, probably another 75% of the companies 500,000+ documents (we're a law firm, so lots of letters and briefs and wills and real estate agreements and who knows what else). Plus some other stuff is up there.
Long story short (and in as much non-geek speak as I can manage) we were having issues with a key part of our mail server, the thing that holds all the data, its called the Information Store, was locking up, which is bad, since people can't access e-mail when it locks up. So I call Microsoft about it and get a Chinese sounding guy on the phone who doesn't seem to be much help. I run diagnostics and whatnot and find that there is nothing wrong with the Information Store file, which is almost 10 GB in size. He suggests it may be an issue with whatever is actually writing data to the hard drive holding the 10 GB file, which is a hard drive on our SAN.
So I contact HP about Microsoft's concerns and they say it can be an issue that can be fixed by applying an upgraded firmware to the SAN. Firmware is basically machine code that tells hardware what to do, like the BIOS on your PC. Getting geeky, I know. So back in the beginning of March I upgrade the SAN firmware along with all the drivers in the servers that connect up to the SAN, and hey, it fixes our lockups on the Information Store. Everything should be great, but its not. HP neglected to tell me that the new version of the firmware can give you about a 30% reduction in SAN performance due to compliance with certain Microsoft standards (told you they'd blame Microsoft eventually, everyone does, since they're such an easy target).
At this point since I'm getting nowhere with the tech support at HP, my boss steps in and takes it upon himself to escalate the problem with HP until they fix it. He does this after heading out to a two hour lunch with the companies finance director (who is a good friend of his) during which he downed two 22 oz beers. So now my boss has a buzz and he's got to get pissed at tech support guys. He lies through his teeth at points about how bad the thing is performing to get them to get it fixed. So they escalate the problem to the proper people and now HP has given us almost a 10+ page e-mail full of tests and diagnostics and settings and such to implement to the SAN and the servers connecting to it. Fun stuff. Of course some of this could involve shutting things down, so he wants to do it tomorrow. I said I could come in tomorrow afternoon/early evening since I have plans, but we'll see what happens. I guess worst case is I could go in Sunday morning, even though it is Mother's Day, but we don't have company coming until much later in the day, but still, fun fun fun.
Don't even get me started at the morons at this other company I've been dealing with. They've been zero help getting their application to run back to acceptable speeds it was running in a previous version. I have a feeling once all this stuff with the SAN is squared away and the performance is back to where it should be my boss is going to set his sights on this other company and God help them if they don't get me a working solution to their performance problem before them. Its going to get messy, but if it fixes the issue, I'm all for it. I need to learn to be an asshole when dealing with tech support idiots sometimes. I'm just too damn nice on the phone.
So thats all the work stuff. Throw in some pain in the ass partners, a couple of pieces of failed hardware, having to come in super early Wednesday and having Keyser keep me up for hours early Thursday morning and you have the week from hell. Well, at least Elena will be here in a little while. I hope she's not super exhausted, although I have the feeling she will be, and I kinda am too, so I shouldn't complain too much.
Thats about it folks. Sorry for boring you with shop talk. I sometimes don't even understand it myself. I tried to read some of the stuff the tech from HP sent us and it sounded like a lot of gibberish, but I'm sure we'll figure it out. So take it easy, have a good weekend and all that fun stuff. And what timing, Elena just pulled up!