All my problems are melting away...

Last night at 6:45pm, I had a number of things wrong:

• Tara was 20 miles away with all the kids, a cousin, her Mom, and a dead van
• I was supposed to be at the church helping the Young Women get connected to the internet there
• I was still at work staring at a Netware cluster that no longer wanted to function

I called Tara's Dad to see if he could get up there and shuttle some kinds down to his house. I called the Young Women's leader to tell her I wasn't going to make it, and talked her through it one more time. We had three of us at work, one at home, and on the phone on vacation in Las Vegas.

I also arraigned to get a minivan to take up to get Tara, and was waiting my brother Tom to make it up to my office to pick me up. Tara called her sister, by the time Tom got up to my office, Tara's brother-in-law had gotten there, jump started the van, and they were ready to come home. This mornign I took the thing down to Autozone, the battery tested fully charged and good. Looks like they just drained the battery. Problem #1 fixed, I think. I also think I owe Tom and Corey a lunch...

The young women were having problems connecting to the wireless at church. We have the access point not broadcasting. They only had one of eight laptops connecting properly. I had them move to a room closer to the access point, and eventually found someone that could go down there and try to help them. I don't know how successful he was, or what really happened after that, but they didn't call back, and the activity was over before I got home, so for now, I am just assuming things went ok.

We beat our heads on the work problem until 9pm or so, to no avail. We should have been off the Netware cluster a while back. We don't have a support contract, I'm not convinced that Novell really wants to support people anymore. (They outsourced their "per incident" support service.) At about 9pm, the guy in Vegas decided he was the best person to open the call, and we decided to let him. I told him to call me if he needed help, one of the other guys planned to be at work at 6:30am to take over if needed. This guy stayed up all night, and got the problem fixed at 6am. (Outside of the service call he made. $1000 for nothing, essentially.) I woke up at 7am, and found the the problem had been fixed.

So, three problems last night, all fixed, that I didn't directly resolve. I like the ones that get fixed for me. I fully expect to walk out the door in a couple of hours and find a new truck sitting in the driveway, waiting for me... I am also seriously considering writing an epistle for work about "IT Brittleness", where I talk about how running services on outdated hardware, old Operating Systems, poor applications, or lack of redundancy causes outages to last longer and take more effort to fix, but that's a story for another day...