[Leica] Outage

[leica_r8 at hotmail.com (Aram Langhans)]

Thanks Brian for all you do for us, and for your friends.  An outage of 
internet access seems very trivial in light of the situation with your 
friend.

Aram

--------------------------------------------------
From: "Brian Reid" <reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us>
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 10:41 AM
To: <lug at leica-users.org>
Subject: [Leica] Outage

> 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
>
>
>
>