IBM Strikes Again! This time, one of their Hard Drives in one of our servers crashed. What does that mean, exactly? It means, even though it’s plugged in, it doesn’t WORK!
I worked on the problem from 8:30 am until 10:30 pm, yesterday, getting the computer back up & running as it should. There were about 3 main things that this computer did, and two of them are “Mission Critical”.
(If you are not a technical person, this next paragraph will make no sense to you.)
The WORST problem I ran into was, a bug in the RedHat installer. I was trying to install RedHat Linux Enterprise, Application Server, and it would ask me ALL the questions, make me click on the TINY LITTLE DOTS for the time zone, and I’d have to type in all this stuff, then, it would get to the part where it is formatting the /boot partition, and BAM! Lock-up! It did this on two DIFFERENT computers, both of them Dell Servers. What was the problem? A BUG in the RedHat installer!! both computers have an ATI RAGE video, and the installer actually has a bug which causes it to hang on this particular video card. Figures. I had to do a text-only install, and that got me back to where I could get the machine up, copy the restored files, Yaay, AMANDA-Backup!, and had EZproxy & Apache back up. Noel had to help with the final setup, as I’d forgotten to install several “dependency-hell” perl mods, and also the gcc compiler (oops).
So, anyway, I worked 13 hours non-stop and learned a lot along the way. Would I do it all over again? NO!
