Wednesday, September 22, 2004
dell & dell tech support
friggen dell computers, seagate cheetah hard disks, and poweredge raid controllers. you all suck.
thank the gods for tech support guys who have a clue (not me, the ones we rang)
3:20 ish, we have a blackout. the building goes black. the fucken phone rings. yes the computers are out, have you noticed it's a blackout? cretin
so we mosey down to the computer room to make sure all is happy and lovely in there. ha ha fucken ha.
the battery backup units are playing their game, everything (mostly) shuts down in an orderly fashion. we're pretty much there for the look of it. and because the mail server will need a hand. in fact 20-40 mins later the power is back on and everything is back up except our mail server is still shutting down. that's ok, we get it sorted. but the fucking file server. will. not. boot. coupla dead disks. welcome to the world of dell servers. we've got 2 identical poweredge servers with external scsi raid disk arrays. all singing all dancing. whenever one of them reboots, for any reason, there's a pretty good chance a disk will die. ballerina spins off the edge of the fucking stage and crashes into the orchestra. about 4 in the past 12-18 months. today we lose 2. and one is part of the mirrored drive. the other is the fucken spare.
so wer're, like, trying different shit, and we're dying. gonig backwards. the brown midas touch. whatever we touch, turns to shit. the boss is about to try a, errr, particularly interesting method of recovery. and i'm like, how about we spend a bit of time talking to the support first.
an hour or so later and we're talking to the first line of support at dell. and every 10 mins or so he's asking if we have a backup.
yes we have a fucking backup. stop fucking asking. if i revert to backup i'm looking at a 2:00am finish at least, and if i have to recover everything, that'll finish, oh, lets say about 2:pm. on saturday. so stop fucking asking (i think quietly to myself....)
yes we have a backup. what about this, what about that, blah blah blah. finally he gets tired of asking his supervisor for answers every 2 minutes and we get to talk to the main guy with a clue.
i hope he got overtime, because i kept him at work until about 7:40. i tried to ring him back after 5:00. and ended up talking to some guy in Malaysia. i said no worries dude, i just need to talk to mr x cause he's been handling it (and he has a fucking clue and speaks english) and this guy (ok he's polite and everything but he can't put me back through to sydney, nor is he my perc-2dc guru) says he reckons that x will ring back. yeah i know that dipshit, he told me he'd ring back in 20 mins, but it's only 5 mins and i wanna get to the next stage already. been for a nervous piss, drank another coke, gibbered a bit, now i'm ready. now. now. now now now now now
x rings back and we try a few things. the prick won't boot. looks like the data is ok (thank the god of lucky friggen morons for that). i couldn't deal with a 250 GB restore. i'm not sure i can deal with just rebuilding it and restoring the main partition anyway but gotta be happy with the little gems ok? the boss is about to press the button, and commit us to an annoying restore with a 2:00am finish, and i ask x if we can reboot now, he's like, just wait i'm thinking. the boss looks at me to say "what the fuck, it's not like we've got any options" and i'm like "what the fuck, i don't reckon we've got any options either. paddling up effluent river and some arsehole who's been eating curry has just hit the fucking flush"
x says ok, try this. put in the BAD disk, fiddle fiddle, fart fart, and fuck me dead if the prick of a thing doesn't start. i'll be fucked. he's leaves us some destructions and about an hour later i'm gone. boss a and boss b have a few little chores to play with, but we're over the hump (it's humpday anyway) and should be easy fucken-peasy tomorrow. (famous last words i hope not).
dell computers. fuck em. i'm over it.
dell support. ok, i've talked to guys in india. had a good old yack to a few dudes in bangalore (supposedly now the IT capital of india they tell me), malaysia etc... but the guy who pulled my arse out of the fire was in sydney (ok and so was the lower level of support who kept asking him for answers). he kept ringing back to make sure we were happy (we weren't) and talked us through to what was fortunately not the bitter end. good on ya mate. heh, the funny thing was, despite being in aus, his accent was definitely not australian. i think he was indian. but at least he understood the fucken language and got me through.
next week, i unload on hp fucken printers :-) (and a new record, for, like, how many times i can say like. do a google search on irritainment)
