Technology Corner April 23, 2005

The week in the life of an A+ Certified Computer Professional. Oh my, that sounds nice huh? Well, trust me when I tell you this, it may sound nice but it does not pay as much as I would like or have been used to. So much for that thought lest I digress.

Monday morning comes along and I am greeted in e-mail by a distress call by a customer who tells me their Dell Poweredge server had been rebooted on Saturday but never came back online properly. So, off to the races I went. I already had several service calls scheduled but this bumped this customer to the top of the list. No file, print or e-mail services means critical business down priority. That means drop your sausage egg and cheese biscuit back in the bag, grab your orange juice, laptop bag and tools, hop in the car and drive to the customer site as fast as you can get there.
So, I arrive at the customer site around 8 am on Monday morning and luckily for me one call to Dell Server Support and two hours later we managed to remount the two drives that had dismounted and the server was back online rebuilding its RAID 5 configuration. Here is a picture of the sick server for those of you that would like a visual reference.

This particular customer bought the server but never really gave much thought as to where they would put it so it wound up in a break room near a sink with running water (gasp). LOL.. Well the server is about 4 feet away from the sink and the server is sitting on the counter with the monitor sitting very close to the edge of the counter. Anyway, its very obvious that the server was an after thought when they bought it. LOL...
Oh yeah, back to the service call on Monday. The admin person that was on site Saturday afternoon was eye balling the backup log for Veritas BackupExec when they noticed that Windows Update had downloaded and installed an update and wanted to reboot the server. Being as no one else was there the admin person rebooted the server and very shortly regretted doing it. They wound up having to email me about the problem from their home email address and because I rarely check my work email during the weekend I did not get it until the following Monday morning.
What happened is when the server rebooted there were a couple of dos based selections that the user needed to respond to AND one of the network cards was set in the BIOS to boot to LAN therefore was sitting at a DHCP dos screen looking for a network boot device and the user needed to just hit esc to blast past that screen. Drives 4 and 8 were dismounted therefore causing the RAID 5 Array to not mount.

In a RAID (Random Array of Independent Disks) you have five hard drives. One drive is used for parity (error checking) therefore its drive space is used up for that and then you have four drives that are used to stripe the information to. In a RAID 5 configuration you can lose one drive completely and the virtual disk will stay in tact but if you lose two of the drives your ship is sunk. Well, anyway I was able to remount both drives, force them back online and let the RAID Array manager within the OS rebuild them. So, around 10:30 am I verified users were back online, logged on to the network, surfing the NET and getting their data and email. Once that was done I was out of there.
The rest of my Monday was spent driving all over the Low Country taking care of this and that printer calls. Monday was one of those hurry up and rush around until your hair catches on fire days.
Tuesday was a relatively easy day that allowed me to putter around in the shop fixing a couple of pc's that I had been waiting on parts for. Tuesday evening even allowed me the time to sit down and study in my MCSE Windows Server 2003 Environment book. I guess I spent from around 5pm until around 8:30 pm studying before I finally went home.
Wednesday arrived with a bang and I found myself running around all over the lowcountry again doing this and that. I started my day out on Sullivan's island at a customers house installing a Linksys wireless print server.

I could not get this thing to talk on the existing wireless network to save my life. I was smart though and instead of spending countless hours beating my head on the coffee table I called Linksys tech support sooner vs later. The problem I was having turned out to be that the user was using XP Professional on their IBM Stinkpad (snicker) and had their Network Connection firewall protected via the Service Pack 2 built in Internet firewall. I had already deduced earlier that this was a problem because I had turned off the Norton Anti Virus Internet Security Firewall on the laptop to no avail. I just forgot to check the Internet Connection to see if it TOO had a firewall turned on. Sigh.... Protection is great to keep the goolies away but if you have too much protection you might as well use the device for a boat anchor. LOL...
I left Sullivans Island around 11 pm, headed out to a customer in the Cainhoy/Huger area , got down diagnosing a pc there and then headed over to the next customer in Summerville SC. This call was for an ancient HP Color Laser Jet printer 5m.

The error message on the screen was 11.4 Load paper in tray 1. The first thing I did was to remove the paper tray, turn on the flashlight bend over and look into the paper path where the tray is. There to my wandering eyes was a piece of mangled paper sitting there in the paper path at the end of the printer. I removed this piece of paper and replaced the paper tray and the printer was happy again. The office manager was not too happy that her staff was not observant enough to catch this problem. I bet they check this out the next time BEFORE they call us out. LOL.....
I was finished with my service calls on Wed around 2:30 pm and I was close to my customer that had server problems on Monday so I figured I would get a burger from McDonalds and then go over there to their break room, eat lunch, check email and check on their backups. When I got there I was greeted by drive four which had dropped offline again and was blinking an orange light. The orange light means a caution condition on the server vs a blue light on the display or a green light on the drive. Orange lights on the server makes network admins like me see RED which causes us to jump into action. So, as you can imagine my leisurely lunch turned into another support call to Dell Tech Support (they rock by the way) and I spent from 3 pm until 8:30 pm with them on the phone diagnosing this and that. We came to the conclusion that the backplane, SCSI drive ID 4, daughter card and scsi adapter cable were faulty. Dell set up the service call for Friday and shipped the parts to a Dell service tech who met me at the client site on Friday.
Thursday was pretty quiet at the office so it allowed me some downtime to study and take care of some office chores that normally dont get done when I am running around with my hair on fire.
Friday morning consisted of one service call to a customer who had moved and the movers (never let a furniture mover move your server or printers folks) had dropped the HP 4550 color laser jet and broke off the plastic back cover.

This printer new costs almost 2500.00 so you can imagine the horror of finding out that the movers (clutz) had damaged the printer. Luckily for the customer the damage was very superficial and they are only going to be out 177 bucks to replace the back cover which of course will be forwarded on to the moving compay for reimbursement.
Well, that pretty much concludes my Monday through Friday I.T. job and what I encountered day to day.