Back to Normal

Well it hasn't taken long for my new job to ramp up from "what shall I do today" to "the earliest I can look at your problem is next Friday". It's good to feel useful again, and to finish each day with the sense of something done. Or, in the case of last Thursday, to finish a four hour outage at 6AM and walk out of the data centre at a major teaching hospital, knowing that I'd helped fix a problem that they have had since July 2006 (HDLM path failover not working on a couple of small HDS boxes attached to a Sun E450). The real problem was that none of the storage folks working the case knew enough about Solaris to get the HDLM software working. Half the battle, as any project manager will tell you, is just coordinating the right skill sets to be in the same place at the same time. His two application specialists, a storage guru from my company, the project manager himself, and me. Five people for four hours to work through HDS' horrible documentation, get the failover working and test it thoroughly. The job should only have taken an hour, tops, but if you have never done it before, it always takes longer.

I've spent more time on site, and driving to and from site, in the last month than I can recall doing in a long time - and I haven't done a 2AM start in the last five years! Still, at least I had the sense to put a bag of Mars bars in my laptop bag before I went to site: any team that's done a couple of hours in the early morning in a cold data centre is going to be pleased to see chocolate.