One of Those Days...

It was one of those days today...

First I made a small change to a server at work which completely broke it. I was being rushed to make the change so didn't give enough thought to what I was doing. If I'd have sat back and thought about it for a second I would have realised that what had been requested would cause problems. Anyway, I tried to back-out the change but I couldn't connect to the server at all remotely - all communications with it had gone down. So I figured I'd have to go over to the data centre and log on to it locally at the console, but...

As I was about to leave, the entry system on the doors to our floors went tits-up and locked us in. Now that's a poorly designed entry system. I know most security systems are supposed to fail-safe into a secure state but surely a basic risk assessment would determine that allowing people to quickly get out of the building in an emergency should be an higher priority than stopping intruders getting in? We ended up being locked in for 90 minutes.

Luckily for me, the server in question isn't in production yet, it's still in UAT (User Acceptance Testing). Nonetheless I still needed to get it quickly up and running again as there are strict deadlines on delivering the milestones of the project.

Besides that when I finally made it out for a late lunch I went to the Queensland Transport Office to pick up my Recreational Marine Drivers Licence, only to discover, after waiting for 30 minutes, that I didn't have enough ID on me.

On my way back to the office I popped in to McDonalds to buy a relatively healthy sub-roll, and it was only when I was halfway through eating it that it dawned on me that I was in fact eating a cheeseburger. They'd given me the wrong order (honest, Guv)!

Back at the office I then discovered that the problem I had earlier with the server had caused another problem. I called out for help to Ken, the Check Point guru, and he quickly realised that we'd have to roll-back the entire server config and do a restore from the last backup. But of course, when Ken went to do the restore it completely failed - the backups hadn't worked properly. In the end we had to go back to a full system snapshot that we had taken on the 8th October, meaning that all the changes that I've made between the 8th Oct and now have been lost - I'd have to do it all again. Luckily I have a record of all the changes and it should be no more than a couple of hours work but even so it's a pain. It just goes to show the importance of testing your backups!

I hate stupid computers! And security systems! And McDonalds. And Queensland Transport regulations!