Burn-out

I added a new category just for this blog: Whine. I just need to vent and this is really beneath a Rant.

I have been trying to get, for several months now, a new file server for the CIS department. I got approval for it in June, I wanted it to be ordered in July, but we finally got it two weeks ago in August. However, the company we ordered it from (one of regular suppliers I will not name here) did not have the brains to send us a cable that fit between the server and external RAID enclosure.

So, after sending us an additional cable that also didn't fit and the CIS department purchasing an adapter to a cable supplied by the vendor, we finally were able to begin real work on setting up the new file server. After that sorry excuse for a football game against Marshall, I headed in to work on Saturday to perform the server upgrade. I anticipated about 10 hours of file copying maybe a bit more, hoping for a bit less. Well, after about 10 hours we weren't really much further than we were an hour after we arrived (Cole was of huge help this weekend and really did most of the early work). At that point, I decided to try and push things through. Looking back, that wasn't a very bright idea. (That is, hind sight being as it is.)

Basically, we were experiencing periodic errors on the system that appeared to be driver related. We'd seen similar SCSI errors on the previous file server with the same driver and similar equipment. With what I know now, that was probably a misinterpretation of the data. Anyway, after pushing on this all night Saturday (~20 hours + ~8 hours from Cole), I managed to copy about 80% of the data from the old file server. At which point, I was finished. I was getting too tired to do anything, so I went home at 10:30 am and slept like a dead man until about 4:00 pm on Sunday. (Missing church is something I very rarely do. Working on Sunday is something I have written out of my weekend schedule on my calendar—literally, I have it blocked off for "Quiet Time".)

When I woke up, my beautiful, caring, and lovely wife fed me and took care of me. I'm not saying that I was an invalid or that this was something to be compared with the experiences of folks in New Orleans right now, but I was used up. Cole, blessed Cole, spent much of the afternoon also working on things and put in another several hours. He'd made a second copy of the files that was complete on another part of the system during that time. I then tried to synchronize that copy with the other and had no success. This should have been a sign of problems more sinister, but I don't think I was yet operating with a complete picture. The work had been split between Cole and myself and we were operating on separate shifts. I worked for another 8 hours or so on Sunday.

I woke up early on Monday after getting about 4 hours of sleep to work on the file server some more. We reached the point where we could not get any further; the original partition had too many errors and simply wouldn't function if we tried to write the rest of the data to it. Cole had succeeded in copying the files over into another partition on the RAID. We decided to format and start over with the home partition and copy from the local mirror. This failed too. Finally, we repartitioned and tried a different file system format and everything went smooth as silk.

Now, we had to reconfigure the systems. Configuring Linux file systems was as easy as setting up the NFS exports and fixing some DNS records. It took us a couple days to get all of Windows straightened out. The blasted things kept wanting to contact the old file server because Windows doesn't really pay attention to DNS for file services. It took quite a bit of effort to get that all straightened out.

Everything was going swimmingly by lunch time today. However, sometime between 2:00 and 2:30, the "smooth as silk" snagged. We got our errors back. We got driver errors and then some minor file system errors and then when I was in the server room looking at the machine, a kernel panic. We rebooted and rather than risk the file systems, we copied everything back over the extra partition we'd been using with success before. The file server is now running off that partition temporarily. Now, we have the glorious job of trying to run a "Level 1 Diagnostic" on the drives. (That was a little ST:TNG lingo for you.)

This also means that my students in CIS 450 are getting short changed because I haven't had time to really prepare for class. It's a good thing I've taught this class 2.5 times before, because my lectures would be all bad instead of just mostly bad if I didn't have most of the facts memorized. Added to this is the fact that CIS is currently being audited for accreditation this semester and I didn't receive the email last semester telling me to collect graded homeworks, exams, and papers from students. Thus, I have nothing. I'm really quite terrible at keeping records and filing and I'm not sure where I'm going to get the paperwork required. Not getting the mail is not my fault (it was no ones fault, just an oversight), but that doesn't make me any less responsible for this. I'm going to have to see if I can get at least some of it back from students. I'm not the only instructor that has had to do this, but I believe I'm the one in the worst shape at this point.

Needless to say, I'm not particularly fond of my job right now. I really like teaching and I really like running the CIS systems, but it is very tiring being on-call all the time for problems. I took a "vacation" this summer, but I could never really escape the department because if something bad happens, it's up to me to make sure it gets fixed. Having responsibilities that I simply can't escape is like being slowly run through a grinder.

Okay, I feel better. I hope folks can forgive me for whining. Cheers.