ASNN

a diversion

So with a Bud Light and a hot dog in my belly, I returned to my dumpy Collinsville, IL hotel. I hopped online (at a whopping 21.6K over a toll-free dialup!!!) to check out what was going on that evening. One thing was the replacement of a hard drive that was part of a RAID array that had degraded. As "our man in Denver" installed the new drive, I drifted between fitful sleep and groggy assistance in getting the new drive configured. By 1a, it became clear that things were not right. As I attempted everything I could think of to get the stupid Adaptec 2100S controller to rebuild the array, it also became clear that I needed to get to Denver.

By 4a, I was driving to Kansas City to fly to Denver (which was cheaper than flying from St. Louis and got me there earlier). There were multiple times (as you can imagine) that I nearly drove off the road, almost asleep at 85mph, but I did manage to get to KC okay. I dropped off my car, basically walked right onto my departing flight, and got more "sleep" on the 1h40m flight.

Alan had squared away my car in Denver, which I picked up and drove straight to the colocation facility. Although I didn't have my badge (since I wasn't *planning* on going to the colo facility), they recognized me and gave me a visitor's badge without requiring an escort. Lots of work ensued, including attempting to recover the data off the "bad" drives (which I *ALMOST* had, until the stupid Adaptec 2100S RAID controller corrupted the partition tables on the recovery disks... grr...) and yanking an Agathon Group server in an attempt to help salvage the customer's data. See, it turns out that the backups we thought were running weren't exactly working correctly. So if we couldn't salvage the data, this client was basically dead in the water.

Working furiously, I stopped only to drink copious amounts of Sam Adams Octoberfest at Bennigan's and crash on the colocation facility's nice leather couch. A day and a half from when I began, the "bad" drives were heading to a data recovery facility (where they have since been recovered), the server had new drives in it, and everything was rebuilt with a stock RedHat Linux image. And I was completely dead to the world.

A quick plane trip back to KC, lots of Boulevard wheat (2-for-1 night at the Ruby Tuesday's!), and an actual full night of sleep (in KC), and I was back on the road. All said, I missed Cleveland (Jacobs Field, one I really wanted to see) and Pittsburgh (PNC Park, another one I really wanted to see), but was able to haul butt to Camden Yards. 650 miles to Columbus, OH, then 420 miles to Baltimore, and I only missed the first inning of the game.

So it's turning out that this isn't much of a vacation, but the Denver trip had to be done. At least Fenway (aka, "Mecca") is still on the horizon...

Posted by pcg at September 25, 2003 9:59 AM