Some days, it just doesn’t pay to chew through the leather straps.

Today, I made the mistake of going to work, and things just went downhill from there.

I should start by mentioning that the one good part about today was that my little girl was with me all day. Of course, this was because she was sick and stayed home from school, but, still, it was the one redeeming quality of the day.

Yesterday, our coloc called and told us that our UPS was beeping, and we needed to come out and take care of it. Well, I promptly forgot about it. When I went in to work this morning, I was reminded of it, and went in to the coloc. We have three machines in a rack there. And it was beeping very loudly, but it did not sound like a UPS beep to me. But, anyways, I shut down the machines, swapped out the UPS, and started them all up again. And it started beeping again. Oy.

So I finally figured out that one of the drives in the RAID array had gone south, and that was what was beeping. So, I figured I would pop down to the computer store, get a new SCSI drive, and pop it in there. Right? Well, there’s a catch. I live in Kentucky – not exactly the technology center of the world. I could not find a store that had SCSI drives as part of their standard stocked items.

By this time, Sarah needed to get her nap, and some lunch, so we went back home, and made some calls while Sarah rested, and tracked down some small custom computer shops that actually had SCSI drives. I expected I could have gotten it cheaper if I had had more time to shop around, but meanwhile, my RAID array was running on 2 drives, and beeping at the sound level of a 747 taking off.

Sarah didn’t take much of a nap, and about 4:30, we headed back out, picked up the drive – an 18G rather than the 9 that I needed, so half of the drive was lost right off the bat – and took it back to the coloc.

The machine in question was a Dell poweredge, which is one of those nice machines that opens up and disassembles easily. But I could not get the darned thing apart, and nobody in the whole building had a screwdriver I could use. So I had to reassemble things, start it back up yet again, and come home to get tools.

We got back there at about 5:30, put the drive in (only had to redo it once, due to having the drive jumpered wrong) and waited an hour while the drive rebuilt.

So it is up and working now, but I don’t recall having a day this frustrating for a very long time.

There were a number of other very frustrating events today, but none of them warrant discussing in a forum this public. Suffice it to say that it was annoying enough to last me a good long time.