[Leica] Outage

[leica at jayburleson.com (Jay Burleson)]

Thank you Brian, for your dedication here, and to your friends well being.

Jay

On 5/24/2013 10:41 AM, Brian Reid 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

-- 
Jay,

Jay Burleson Gallery <http://jayburleson.com/leica/gallery/index.php/>
"A photographer is simply someone who is
looking for something that can't be found.
The photograph is the record of that attempt."