Entries this day: Work Work2

Work

6:31pm CDT Tuesday 9 May 2000

A couple of interesting things at work today:

1. With some help from Kevin, I rewrote a screen on our big project. This screen is called rateWho; it displays a list of names for whom an individual may provide feedback. Originally, I designed the screen so that if a person had missed the time-frame to rate someone, that someone's name would not show up. As written, the screen checked a field in a dataset to see if it was too late to provide feedback.

   The new improved design requires that all names be displayed. The "too late" names are written in a different list that says something like, "Too late, sucker," or something to that effect.

   Kevin wrote a phat SQL query (I've messed with SQL before, but don't totally remember it now) that pulled in 3 different data sets and created one table with all the information I needed to output the appropriate lists. I finished it at 6pm and zipped home.

2. We are moving. Work, I mean.

   The landlords have increased our rent by 60%, but have not increased the quality of the building worth a dooky, so we are outta there! Timeframe is like 60 to 90 days. It's pretty exciting, and I'm thankful that I basically know enough about the network that I can transfer it as it exists to the new location. It'll mean hooking up a new DSL circuit at our new place; I will call our ISP soonly on that.

   We're moving just 2 city blocks away, which is not too far, but significant for me: it's on the other side of the freeway, and 2 city blocks further away from our new house. I'm sure I'll survive. Maybe I'll get a bike soon and bike those extra two blocks.

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   Work2

   11:33pm CDT Tuesday 9 May 2000

   Ack. I just got a call from Kevin. He booted our webserver tonight and it's not coming back up. After it checks the memory, finds the disks, gets past the "press spacebar to use last known good configuration", it flashes error codes and restarts.

   I'm going in to work now.

   3:45am CDT Wednesday 10 May 2000

   Sure enough, when I arrive the server was still rebooting itself as described above. I didn't know what to try, except maybe reinstalling Win NT on the machine... maybe it would allow us to refresh the system files instead of overwriting everything. We really didn't want to lose any data.

   I asked Kevin if it was more important to save the data or just blast through and reinstall, which would (probably) be faster. He said saving the data is more important.

   Called Microsoft support, paid $245, and the short version of the story is that all data was safe.

   Mostly just in talking to the tech guy (Derek (sp)), I worked myself through my own solution.

   First brainstorm: we have two drives in the machine, and they are mirrored. So presumably, we can take one drive out, have the copy of the data there, fix the other drive, restore the data.

   Took one drive out, and magically, the other drive booted no problem. And all the data was there.. Except it was all one week old.

   Swapped the drives, and magically, the other other drive booted no problem. And all the data was there. And it was up to date.

   The theory is that when we had a power outage last week, one drive was corrupted, and hadn't been written to since. When we tried to boot with both drives, the OS said, "hey these drives aren't mirrored!" and wouldn't boot.

   Low level formatted the week-old-data drive, recreated the mirror, everything is happy.

   During the low level format, I got to talk to Hillary on AOL IM. That was great fun! Now I'm going to bed.

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