04/05/2006: "Continued employment"

I am on the phone right now with my reason for continuing employment--the storage vendor whose name resembles a popular and well-known equation. The equipment we purchased from them, while initially sound, has been giving us no end of trouble since we had to power it down and then back on for the Hurricane Rita evacuation. Currently, my NAS gateway has forgotten about its attached Gator 64000 tape library and is refusing to perform backups over NDMP. This obviously causes us problems, because I have 35TB of crap to back up. While we are still happily backing the data up via a rotating system of twenty incremental file system checkpoints, which record the delta (changed data) between any given point in time and the current state of the file system, this is a short term-only solution and does not give us historical information past twenty days, so the clock is ticking for the storage vendor to fix our stuff so our backups work again.

One side effect of backups to tape not working is that restores from tape aren't working right now, either. Obviously, restores are the key point of backups. So, this is somewhat of a problem.

I don't mind. I'm working from home today, which I have begun doing on some days. So, I'm at home at my computer, which is running a virtual computer inside of VMWare, which is running the company-required external access software, tunneling into the corporate network, and connecting to my desktop computer at work with RDC, and then the support guy is also connecting to my desktop via Webex, and we're then both connecting to my NAS gateway via SSH with PuTTY. That's a lot of connections. I feel so...so...so digital!

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