gene.williams
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Last Tuesday night, about 7:30 pm, I'm up here in my cube with Steelman. My wife is at meet-the-teacher night with My daughter, so I decided to bring my 4-year-old boy up here with me to hang out while I ironed out some wrinkles in the AIX/TSM upgrade to 5.2 I had run earlier in the day (TSM is my primary responsibility - it's responsible for backing up all 275 servers belonging to the TX House and Senate and the various state committees and sister agencies to the Council). I'm proud that I remembered to bring the best $100 I've ever spent - the portable DVD player - and my son is quietly watching his Disney movie while I work.
So anyway, it's about 7:35 PM, when I think to myself, "well, backups start at 8:00; it's 7:35 now; and I just brought TSM up after having it down for an hour or so making minor config changes . . . I'd better run a test backup to make sure the upgrade went as well as it seemed." The test failed. I quickly ran a script to check communications between the TSM server and the 275 TSM clients. . . it failed. Scrambling through logs and troubleshooting frantically, I finally began to see what was causing the problem. Eureka! It will only take about 20 minutes to set things right! I looked at the clock to see that backups begin in 4 minutes and 30 seconds. My elbows hit the desk, and my face sunk into my hands, and my head slowly shook back and forth in a "why me?" fashion when it hit me! I can write and run a few quick scripts to reschedule the 8:00 backups to run with the 9:00 backups - that'll buy me an hour to fix the problem, and the 8:00's and 9:00's are really the smallest groups, so they won't bog down the server too much.
I began working as fast as I could, querying the server for which clients were in the 8:00 group, pasting them into script that would reschedule them, and brilliantly (in my feable mind) using sed to get the scripts written quickly. I had several windows up, because really there are many servers involved that make up our TSM environment. Anyway, I'm just about finished with 1 and a half minutes to go, and suddenly it happened. My PC screen went black. . . .
. . . . you know, if you put yourself in the mindset of a 4-year-old who's lost interest in his movie and has begun to explore this strange cubical environment because your dad isn't paying attention to you, you can almost understand the inability to resist temptation a few feet away from you on the floor - the cool, red glow of an on/off switch on a power strip.
Gene Williams
[email protected]
So anyway, it's about 7:35 PM, when I think to myself, "well, backups start at 8:00; it's 7:35 now; and I just brought TSM up after having it down for an hour or so making minor config changes . . . I'd better run a test backup to make sure the upgrade went as well as it seemed." The test failed. I quickly ran a script to check communications between the TSM server and the 275 TSM clients. . . it failed. Scrambling through logs and troubleshooting frantically, I finally began to see what was causing the problem. Eureka! It will only take about 20 minutes to set things right! I looked at the clock to see that backups begin in 4 minutes and 30 seconds. My elbows hit the desk, and my face sunk into my hands, and my head slowly shook back and forth in a "why me?" fashion when it hit me! I can write and run a few quick scripts to reschedule the 8:00 backups to run with the 9:00 backups - that'll buy me an hour to fix the problem, and the 8:00's and 9:00's are really the smallest groups, so they won't bog down the server too much.
I began working as fast as I could, querying the server for which clients were in the 8:00 group, pasting them into script that would reschedule them, and brilliantly (in my feable mind) using sed to get the scripts written quickly. I had several windows up, because really there are many servers involved that make up our TSM environment. Anyway, I'm just about finished with 1 and a half minutes to go, and suddenly it happened. My PC screen went black. . . .
. . . . you know, if you put yourself in the mindset of a 4-year-old who's lost interest in his movie and has begun to explore this strange cubical environment because your dad isn't paying attention to you, you can almost understand the inability to resist temptation a few feet away from you on the floor - the cool, red glow of an on/off switch on a power strip.
Gene Williams
[email protected]
