Productivity!

My office email died Wednesday evening. I'm still not clear exactly what happened but it appears some patches to Active Directory went badly; there were also some issues with Exchange. All of these are managed by another team at our corporate HQ in California so once the email went down, I largely lost contact with the mothership. They could reach me by telephone, instant messaging and IRC but email is especially useful for detailed, lengthy (if necessary) text more than these other modes. As well, there are items I've saved & archived in my email account which would be useful to have.

In any case, the death of AD also blocked my access to our in-house wiki and work ticket system. While fixing my little issue might be an easy task, no one was available because the entire team was working on the larger Exchange issue.

Friday afternoon, my access was restored. And the floodgates opened.

Yesterday evening and this morning, I have:

• upgraded RAM in four blades;
  
• re-imaged said blades with a newer version of Linux;
  
• created & configured 12 vservers on those blades;
  
• updated work tickets with completed tasks;
  
• finished the hardware inventory of my part of the production data center;
  
• updated tonnes o' documentation our in-house wiki;
  
• dropped off a dead load balancer at FedEx to send to load balancer heaven;
  
• dropped off a stack of packages at the post office;
  
• created additional work tickets and sent them to my boss for approval;
  
• pushed patches to a handful of systems in our disaster recovery location;
  
• pushed an entire fresh code bundle to a different disaster recovery cluster;
  
• caught up on a tonne o' email, responding to various requests and queries.

This afternoon, we're going to a C2 holiday dance called by John Marshall and Bill Harrison in Alexandria, VA. This evening, Butch Adams is calling Mainstream thru C1 for the DC Lambda Squares' holiday community dance in Silver Spring, MD. More news later!

Productivity!

My office email died Wednesday evening. I'm still not clear exactly what happened but it appears some patches to Active Directory went badly; there were also some issues with Exchange. All of these are managed by another team at our corporate HQ in California so once the email went down, I largely lost contact with the mothership. They could reach me by telephone, instant messaging and IRC but email is especially useful for detailed, lengthy (if necessary) text more than these other modes. As well, there are items I've saved & archived in my email account which would be useful to have.

In any case, the death of AD also blocked my access to our in-house wiki and work ticket system. While fixing my little issue might be an easy task, no one was available because the entire team was working on the larger Exchange issue.

Friday afternoon, my access was restored. And the floodgates opened.

Yesterday evening and this morning, I have:

• upgraded RAM in four blades;
  
• re-imaged said blades with a newer version of Linux;
  
• created & configured 12 vservers on those blades;
  
• updated work tickets with completed tasks;
  
• finished the hardware inventory of my part of the production data center;
  
• updated tonnes o' documentation our in-house wiki;
  
• dropped off a dead load balancer at FedEx to send to load balancer heaven;
  
• dropped off a stack of packages at the post office;
  
• created additional work tickets and sent them to my boss for approval;
  
• pushed patches to a handful of systems in our disaster recovery location;
  
• pushed an entire fresh code bundle to a different disaster recovery cluster;
  
• caught up on a tonne o' email, responding to various requests and queries.

This afternoon, we're going to a C2 holiday dance called by John Marshall and Bill Harrison in Alexandria, VA. This evening, Butch Adams is calling Mainstream thru C1 for the DC Lambda Squares' holiday community dance in Silver Spring, MD. More news later!