My Day Sucked

On Sunday thunderboomers roared through Atlanta. As happens so often the building where I work lost power. My team lead was called in around 7:30 at night and he called me around 9:00 to find out what activation profiles to use on the Sysplex machines. About an hour later he called back and asked if I would do the POR's on them. Ain't gonna try to explain. It's a mainframe thing.

I had to go out to my car to get my laptop. Booted it up and did my thing to get on the network and I couldn't get Internet Explorer to hook up to our VPN to get to the HMC's. I fired up Netscape 7.0 and it worked, kind of. I got to two of the machines and did my thing. I called into Operations and told him I couldn't get to the other two machines but told him what profiles he needed to use. He said we had really bad network problems. He also told me that one of our processors got fried and IBM had been called and a CE was on the way.

About 2:00 AM my phone rang. It was my team lead. He asked me to call in on our conference call line. We were on the phone with the rest of my team for about 45 minutes discussing where we were (In the shitter.) and what we were gonna do about it (Cuss a lot!).

IBM was working on the fried processor. We were still having problems with the VPN. Could I come in early?

I got back to sleep and made it in to work a little after 7:00. Went upstairs and my team lead was still there. We couldn't get our SNA network going because the VPN was fucking up real bad. Just our luck that we had users in Malaysia, China, and Australia this week. The Australians were gonna be on the fried processor (which still wasn't fixed and wouldn't be until Monday night maybe). China was gonna be on another processor that they could get to as soon as we got the network up.

The network guys finally ran another cable over the floor from the router to the failing hub and all of a sudden the network was up. We were now able to get our CMC's working and get the SNA network up and running. This was around 10:00 in the morning. My team lead went home to get some sleep. I started trying to get network connections to two other machines.

While I was working on that, my phone rang. It was the loading dock and they said there were two big boxes being delivered. It was our new processor! We had been trying to upgrade our infrastructure since last year when we started on the German project. It was supposed to pay for our upgrades, but when it fell through there was no backup plan. Finally, last month we got funding and got the new processor on order.

I had to drop everything and show the movers where to take it. In a nice twist, this processor is gonna replace a processor that will replace the processor that got fried on Sunday.

I went back down to my desk and did some more work on the network. I checked, rechecked, and checked again all my network definitions but I still couldn't get it to work. I have another set of network connections, but they run through the fried box. The set of connections I was working on may never have worked and I never knew it, since the other connections worked flawlessly.
I had been planning on putting some IP connections to them through their OSA adapters, but never got around to it.

My team lead called in and we worked on the network together for another couple of hours. Everything looked good. It just wouldn't work. I tried some magic and tried to connect via another system with no luck.

Hopefully the fried processor will come up tonight and the rest of the network will connect up through that box.

All I know is that I worked eleven hours today and I am beat. I am going to bed early tonight.

Hopefully tomorrow won't suck.

Posted by denny at May 17, 2004 08:25 PM