[Leica] Outage

[jshulman at judgecrater.com (Jim Shulman)]

Good on you for helping your friend's widow.  The list can easily wait.

Best,
Jim


-----Original Message-----
From: lug-bounces+jshulman=judgecrater.com at leica-users.org
[mailto:lug-bounces+jshulman=judgecrater.com at leica-users.org] On Behalf Of
Brian Reid
Sent: Friday, May 24, 2013 1:42 PM
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



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