As I write this I have been at work for 32 hours, less a couple lunch breaks.
It wasn’t my idea.
We had a minor power catastrophe early Tuesday morning that cooked a UPS and a generator bypass switch. Our electrician/cabling/fiber guy said flame shot out of the bypass box when he threw the switch after the UPS went down, but the secondary UPS kept things going for about 30 minutes. I work in the network department at a university - our machine room has several racks of servers for various departments on campus, plus our primary connection to the rest of the planet. My machines are the DNS/DHCP servers for this campus and several research offices around the state, which I didn’t suspect of having a problem. However, about 27 hours after this happened, we started getting complaints about nameservice not updating, and registered machines getting dynamic addresses, so I checked the times on the appropriate files and see that they hadn’t been updated in the last 12 hours.
Oh shit. It seems the power bounce may have corrupted a file that allows the DNS/DHCP registration database to update the servers. So fine, we’ve got a spare machine already in the rack, I just need to bring the software up to the current version, and we can run that until the newer machine is repaired.
Not as easy as it sounded at the time. I tried to install the new software without wiping the disk and starting from the O/S - should have worked fine. Something, somewhere on that machine just wouldn’t let the new database install correctly. It looked like it worked, but it couldn’t talk to the other servers, so I took it down to bare aluminum and started a fresh install of everything. (This is the third attempt, between failed communication and a Sasser infection because I left it on the live network while I did the anti-virus.) Win2k, patches, antivirus, updated def files, Sybase 12, patches, and the Lucent DNS/DHCP server program and even more patches.
The install just finished. Now I can configure.
Boy, there’s gonna be OT and shift diff on this one, I tell ya…
-mdf