Entries this day: service_pack_5

service pack 5

8 September 1999

At work, we have our webserver inhouse. The machine, whose name is Mickey (I always think of the Toni Basil (sp) song), hasn't been regularly maintained because no one wanted to shut down our web server. Mickey needed two things fixed:
1) update from Service Pack 3 to Service Pack 5
2) mirror the disk drive with another drive

Looking at our web traffic statistics, I saw clearly that we have small traffic after business hours, so I figured we could easily shut it down at night and make the updates.

I felt confident in my ability to install Service Pack 5, but I wasn't so sure about mirror disks, so I called in super smart friend John to help with that. John brought Maggie, since her car had a flat tire and they were on their way home from work.

What I did *not* do, however, was make sure my boss was cool with me having a "guest" (or two) in the office after hours, much less having someone else mess with the machines. When we arrived at like 6:30, no one else was there. Whew. So far so good.

We shut down Mickey ("oh Mickey, what a pity you have to get the boot") and a few seconds later a different machine beeped, "hey! where'd the webserver go??" This nosey machine, named Tramp, can page or send email when the webserver has a problem.

Oops!! So I shut down Tramp's webserver monitor and hoped that no page had been made, nor email sent.

I called my bosses at this point to keep them from wondering what was going on (if in fact they even knew the server was down) Boss 1 wasn't home (was he on his way to the office???) Boss 2 was like, "no problem, thanks for calling!"

Few minutes later, someone dialed in to Tramp; it was Patrick, not a boss, but someone I hadn't called. Hmmm. So I sent him a message that popped up on his screen

HI - this is Rob; I'm adding 
Service Pack 5 to Mickey."

We kept working. And actually at this point we were just trying to figure out why Windows wouldn't recognize the other disk drive. The SCSI controller could see it; the SCSI IDs were set correctly, but Windows wouldn't recognize it.

We gave up on that at like 8:40 and decided to install Service Pack 5. This finished with no problem at around 9pm.

The drive still wouldn't come up.

So that was it. No one came in, "aha! you have unauthorized guests!" Instead, we left for Chinese dinner at Hunan Dragon. permalink