Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/05/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Brian thanks as well from Canada for all you do. Your a decent guy and that medical mission just puts the icing on the cake so to speak. Hope your friend is in good hands. Scott On 2013-05-24, at 2:50 PM, Aram Langhans <leica_r8 at hotmail.com> wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > Leica Users Group. > See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information