Humor from the world of IT
Some reasonably funny stories from the world of IT today. As a fair warning I should remind my readers that funny IT stories is something of an oxymoron. At a minimum it's important to remember that any story involving activities after midnight, alcohol or Las Vegas is 100 times funnier than any IT story, just as a baseline, it goes up from there. So with that warning in place, I'll continue.
So I was working on moving a virtual server to a physical server. I was going to do this by swapping IPs. Both machines had two network cards, an external and an internal. So my plan was to disable both of the cards on the server I was moving to, give them the old server's IP addresses, disable the cards on the old server and enable the cards on the new server. Well I had overlooked the fact that I was remoting in to the new server so the minute I disabled the internal card my own connection was cut off... No big deal right I can just go into the server room. When I got there I noticed that one of the doors had been taken off and replaced by a wall with a bunch of fans. It was then that I remembered the e-mail I got yesterday "No one will be able to get into the server room tomorrow they're doing a pressure test for the fire suppression system." With no network or physical access I was basically screwed. Fortunately they were just about done and I was able to get back in a few minutes later.
The reason I was moving from virtual to physical is that the searches were really slow (the machine was running the software for all of our web searches). We'd had a consultant come out and spend a day looking at things and he was convinced that that was the problem. And in fact when I had set up a physical server to test it the searches were about 30 times as fast, so it certainly looked like he had a point. Well that was just temporary, this morning was the permanent move and when we made the switch it was just as slow... Obviously that's a bad thing. So I started to examine what was missing. The search software uses a backend database to track what people search on (called SearchTrends). I turned out when I did the first physical test I hadn't had the time to set that up, but since this mornings move was permanent, I did set it up and it turns out all the slow-down was due to that.
Now you would think that the consultant from the company would have checked that out. I mean it's really easy to test, and I can only imagine that if we had a problem with it, someone, somewhere would have had the same problem and it would have been one of the things he checked. I'm fully aware that the vast majority of my excuses are thin rationalizations for sloth, but on this point, I think that if someone who works for the company can't figure out what's wrong with their product, then I can hardly be expected to.
A little steamed
So I was working on moving a virtual server to a physical server. I was going to do this by swapping IPs. Both machines had two network cards, an external and an internal. So my plan was to disable both of the cards on the server I was moving to, give them the old server's IP addresses, disable the cards on the old server and enable the cards on the new server. Well I had overlooked the fact that I was remoting in to the new server so the minute I disabled the internal card my own connection was cut off... No big deal right I can just go into the server room. When I got there I noticed that one of the doors had been taken off and replaced by a wall with a bunch of fans. It was then that I remembered the e-mail I got yesterday "No one will be able to get into the server room tomorrow they're doing a pressure test for the fire suppression system." With no network or physical access I was basically screwed. Fortunately they were just about done and I was able to get back in a few minutes later.
The reason I was moving from virtual to physical is that the searches were really slow (the machine was running the software for all of our web searches). We'd had a consultant come out and spend a day looking at things and he was convinced that that was the problem. And in fact when I had set up a physical server to test it the searches were about 30 times as fast, so it certainly looked like he had a point. Well that was just temporary, this morning was the permanent move and when we made the switch it was just as slow... Obviously that's a bad thing. So I started to examine what was missing. The search software uses a backend database to track what people search on (called SearchTrends). I turned out when I did the first physical test I hadn't had the time to set that up, but since this mornings move was permanent, I did set it up and it turns out all the slow-down was due to that.
Now you would think that the consultant from the company would have checked that out. I mean it's really easy to test, and I can only imagine that if we had a problem with it, someone, somewhere would have had the same problem and it would have been one of the things he checked. I'm fully aware that the vast majority of my excuses are thin rationalizations for sloth, but on this point, I think that if someone who works for the company can't figure out what's wrong with their product, then I can hardly be expected to.
A little steamed
posted by DireKobold at 1:15 PM
1 Comments:
The karma wave continues, heh-heh.
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