Some days you're the windshield.
And some days you're the bug.
Today, I felt like the bug.
Oh, I've had worse days. It's just that today wasn't all that great. Smirk called as I was heading into work to warn me that one of our servers was dead. The one that wasn't backed up because we kept meaning to move sites off that server because we knew it would fail at some point in time (but we got it working later in the day and backed up).
P was still recoving from having done an upgrade on another server; he broke the cardinal rule: “if it ain't broke—don't fix it!” Although all he was trying to do was upgrade to PHP [1] 5 but well, Insipid, the control panel didn't like that one bit—at least, on that version of the control panel on that version of the operating system.
Which meant I couldn't turn the server that overheated [2] a little over a week ago back on (I kept it off until I was sure the A/C (Air Conditioning) wouldn't fail), since I needed the crash cart, and P was too busy using that to recover from the upgrade.
[At least the guard rail was down this time] [3] [4]
R (I manage a few servers for him) called a few times about the lack of email. His ISP (Internet Service Provider) is The Monopolistic Phone Company, and they will, at the drop of a hat, refuse to accept email from the outside, and since his email address is through his domain, hosted on his server, all this lovely spam gets directed through his server towards The Monopolistic Phone Company, which doesn't like that very much (this has only happened about a bazillion times this month alone).
Then there was the new customer circuit. It sounded promising at first—they have a Cisco router and don't need us to manage it. And it's an ethernet connection (they're in the same building, just down the hall) so it's nothing terribly complicated—I have them some IP (Internet Protocol) addresses (earlier this week) and truthfully, wasn't expecting much problem.
Only they weren't as clueful as I expected—it's Ethernet, **not** a T-1, connection. Which necessitated a rethink on the IP routing (I have them two small blocks thinking they'd be routing through their Cisco, but since they couldn't use it, they wanted a single larger block), and all this at around 5:30 pm (of course!).
The whole day at the office was like this—small problems that just wouldn't go away.
Smirk calls such days “Day 10,” as in “they only happen every ten days or so.”
I hate Day 10.
[3] /boston/2006/08/11/thumb.tri-rail.jpg
![[3] /boston/2006/08/11/thumb.tri-rail.jpg](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2006/08/11/thumb.tri-rail.jpg){kind=link}
![[4] /boston/2006/08/11/tri-rail.jpg](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2006/08/11/tri-rail.jpg){kind=link}