Quote:
Originally Posted by poohbear_nc
 Arghhhh! I too remember those cpio nightmares ... and loathed the backup tapes .... and those slooooooooooow tape drives I was burdened with ..... |
The problem was less cpio, and more the tapes and tape drive.
But I was dealing with a setup built cheap, and paying the price.
When we got the opportunity to upgrade hardware, I said "Instead of supporting one call center, the new setup is supposed to support four. You
will spend the money and get industrial strength hardware so we are less likely to have 400 or so users sitting on their hands because we went down."
My boss agreed, but that was in part because the money for the industrial strength hardware wouldn't be coming out of
his budget. I wound up supporting Sun servers running Solaris instead of a PC clone running SCO Open Server, and reliability soared.
The major failure after that change had my irony meter pegging offscale. I'd just sat down to dinner when the night supervisors called to tell me they couldn't log in. That was odd, because I could do so from home via SSH. I decided I'd better go see what the issue was. (I lived in walking distance of the office.)
I got there to find everyone sitting on their hands. Not only was the Sun box down - so was the Novell server supporting another set of functions. I brought them back up and watched goggle eyed as the big mutha APC UPS glitched and put them down again.
Okay. Unplug them from the APC and find other places to plug them in, take the APC out of service for repair, bring the systems back up, do the cleanup, and get everyone back online. I got home to interrupted dinner around 10pm.
At 2am, my phone rang. It was the night lead supervisor. She was trying to do her production reports, and couldn't get to the NT server where those reports resided. I blinked sleep from my eyes, suggested a couple of things she could try, and said if that didn't work, leave a note on my desk and I'd send the reports for her in the morning. At 2:30am, the phone rang again. It was the night supervisor, who just wanted to tell me she was able to send the reports and I didn't have to worry.
Er, leave a note on my desk?
The next day I was at a meeting because we were being acquired and merged, and one of the other participants was the SVP who had hired me. He asked how I was and I said "Tired!", and explained why. When I got to the calls at 2am and 2:30am, his eyes got very big and he said "Why was she calling you at those hours over something that trivial?" "Larry, it's because she don't
know it's trivial. She's trying to do her job, and dot the Is and cross the Ts. I respect that, which is why she's still
alive. She needs to be told by her boss that it
is trivial, and I've already had that conversation with him."
She was later released by the company, and my "reading between the lines" take was that the real reason was being too stupid to do the job as required. I concurred.
______
Dennis