Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/05/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Kudos for both your efforts and your compassion. Herbert Kanner kanner at acm.org 650-326-8204 Question authority and the authorities will question you. On May 24, 2013, at 10:41 AM, Brian Reid <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us> wrote: > On Monday May 20 I got a call from someone I didn't know saying that my > late best friend's widow was in the emergency room in Princeton and had > just been diagnosed with a spinal tumor from diffuse large B cell lymphoma > and would after palliative treatment be released to two friend-of-a-friend > types. They called me as a last resort because they couldn't find anyone > else to whom to hand her off, and she wasn't in any shape to take care of > herself. > > I instantly got on an airplane to go deal with it. I'm pretty much all > she's got left. To Burlington, New Jersey, which is a far suburb of > Philadelphia. > > Before the airplane reached cruising altitude, a critical component in my > server complex failed that resulted in my entire internet operation being > offline. Not only was the LUG down, but all of my personal and family > stuff was offline as were the mailboxes of the other 1900 people for whom > I run email service (not everyone trusts gmail). > > Juggling my time between dealing with the cancer patient and remote > diagnosis of the network problem, by Wednesday evening I determined that > the problem was the HP2848 switch that connects my house to its fiber > optic link to the internet exchange. These devices are not supposed to > fail, enough so that HP offers an unconditional lifetime warranty should > one ever fail. Fat lot of good that does at 2am when you have a broken one. > > You can't just get a new device and stick it in. These things have to be > configured. And of course all of the configuration information is on > servers that I can't reach because of the outage. > > By various processes too complex to explain here, a team of 6 people > coordinated by my daughter Elizabeth managed to locate a replacement and > get it configured and installed. > > This is by far the worst outage I've had in the 20 years I've been doing > this. I couldn't even read my own email. Now that I can read it again, it > has hundreds of "hey, is the server down?" messages. Forgive me if I don't > answer them individually. > > I'm leaving my cancer patient in paid-for hands and heading home tomorrow. > None of that gear would *dare* to fail when I'm home, though. > > Whew. > > Brian Reid > LUG Saloon Keeper and part-time unlicensed oncology nurse > > > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information