Ok so here is the skinny, problems with blogging and work be damned. This is now summertime, the time when most students flock to exotic locals to complete the yearly metamorphosis from the pupa stages to the Butterflies of the summer. Spreading their wings letting their minds go and recharging their attention spans only to be beaten back down in the fall, as the seasons gently slide into one another. this it the time that the diligent tech worker in the university setting gets to recharge his own batteries, or rather to fix all of the things that get broken during a term. i write this a brisk breeze floats over my back. This cool waft of air would be great if i was on the beach, in a park or even not in work. But the breeze gets under my skin for a different reason. My window hasn’t been open for more than 10 minute since i took residence in this building 3 years ago. But now it is a necessity. Why might you ask because my employer has decided to work on the air conditioning, replacing a vast chunk of it. Again with proper notification this would also not be a problem. My first clue that there might be issues with the air was last week when it got unbearably hot in my office right before they were performing planned maintenance on the Electricity in the building. Again not a problem because i knew about it. But the problem didn’t relieve itself the next day. So i left my office on friday with only two servers running, the departmental printing and file server and the web-server. I come in on monday and don’t notice anything, except the unnatural heat, until i get a phone call around Noon. one of the professors was looking into our lab website and couldn’t get to it. I check the file server, no issues there except a heat advisory from friday night. Ambient Temp in the office according to the front panel of the server, 91 degrees F. a bit warm. heat advisory tips off at 95 Ambient. It took approximately 3 hours to clear that alarm. but i digress. Web server not showing anything of the monitor, unresponsive to keyboard or mouse, reboot… nothing. No boot volumes found. Scsi Utilities only to find the boot drive is dead. The heat killed the server… great. Now i find out that the cooling will be off for the next three weeks, hence the window, the breeze, and the impending doom. If only I had been notified. Then i find out that the other Department which lives in our building was notified of the cooling work. so where does the blame lie, not that it matters. Was someone in my department notified of the work and neglected to tell me? Shouldn’t the neighbor have notified its upstairs tenants. And one smaller rub here. I share a common external affiliation with the IT guy for their department. Shouldn’t he have notified me as a gesture of kindness. Whatever the excuse, whoever the blame lies on. Its now our problem. Tomorrow the hunt for an extra disk resumes. until then no server for you.

Technorati Tags: news, Summer, Work, Ponderings, Spring