Thirty-nine Steps

Another Bastard Programmer from Hell classic:

- “What?? 1.5 weeks power outage?” I cry
- “Yeah, they’re installing some new power plant, so our building is in the dark for 1.5 weeks. Nothing to worry about. Half of the personnel is on holiday anyway”, Dennis says calmly
- “WAIT A MINUTE; What about the (il)legal servers under my desk?”, with a frantic look on my face.
- “Euh… yeah well… they’ll be down”, Dennis, calm as ever
- “Yeah, and what about half of the people that ARE here, they’ll need the apps on those servers, right?”
- “Well if they’re not official servers, not much we can do about it, is there?”. This guy really pisses me off.

Time to take matters in our own hands. Click click, restoring some backups on the old backup box. Done.
Now back in the DC they’ll have power, so I call the DC-dude to see if he has some space left in their geek-room. Walking with the server through the gate, the security guy looks as if I’m taking a bomb into the building. With a smile I say: “It’s only temporary”.

Opening the door of the geek-room, an instant cold wind blows us in the face. What a noise. God how I love the smell of electronics in the afternoon. Now all we have to do is find a safe spot on the floor to put our precious merchandise. Hmm, there, nice and close to the loose network cable and power supply. I plug her in and fire her up, damn, no DHCP. I check the list for a free IP, reboot, and away she goes. I also ask the DC-dude to set up some DNS entry so that it becomes more easy to find our little baby; “Yeah sure, it’s a temporary solution” (NOT).

Back at the office.
Someone asks: “Jow Dennis, what about that power outage? Will we still have all those cool apps from the COpilot server?”
- “Yeah well, euh, I’m looking into that”, he says.
- “YES OF COURSE”, I shout from my desk “they’re on a server in the DC”
Dennis looks at me with a dumb look. “What do you mean, we don’t have a DC server”
- “Yes we do, it’s been there for ages”.

Een verhaaltje van een tijdje geleden, maar daarom niet minder leuk. Voor de niet-IT-ers: jullie kunnen proberen te snappen waarom ITers dit leuk vinden, maar of jullie erachter komen is een andere zaak. Geeky stuff this…

Bite2 is coming, so it was time to secure some unofficial servers. The COPIL01 was too well known, so I decided to reinstall the long forgotten VBEGN050, the server from hell. Firing up this beauty, I recalled some of the old stories: sneaking it out of the DC in MBs car, crashing it trying to install Linux, keeping it out of every monitoring activity at the DC, recovering data when Win2000 refused service, those were the days…

Installing Win2000 advanced server (unofficial version) was a quicky, no complications, appart from having to flip the 3 SCSI drives, bays 0 to 2, and having to ignore some critical errors when starting disk 0. I guess it’s nothing, Checkdisk turned up with “no serious harm done”. Enabled ISS: FTP and HTTP (8080) and SMTP. Now all that was left was Apache, Mysql and Php. Ripped the latest versions from the net, installed, configuered, started servises, done.

Having now 5 screens on my desk, I thought this was a bit over the edge, I didn’t want the Overhead Layer asking questions. So I sneaked into the old server room, now deserted, and polled the network cable with my portable. Just as I had suspected, it was dead. Damn! The Freak from the DC had disconnected it when upgading to the new 100mbit network. While taking a leak I had a go at the patch room door, no joy. It was locked.

The annoying noise under my desk was becoming unbearable. I had to get rid of this headacke. Normally jelling a little bit at the PCD (Project Coordinator Dude) would have helped, but he was not around, so, that was not an option. I had to get some network into there, and fast. Inquiries to the Think Team about them having a network connection that
they could spare, turned up negative. All connection were taken for their lousy portables with their even lousier software. As if they need it. I could put it under the DOC (Departamental Overhead Chick) desk, but sooner or later she would find out too. So the only option was to call the Freak from the DC. Risking my ass to be trown in his basement, I called… no answer. Damn! What now?

It was that geek with the glasses from Production Systems that came up with a brilliant idea. Seems the DO dude from the Pussy Department had a spare key. Whilsteling, I walked up to his desk, opened up the top drawer and there it was, a key…. Silently I sneaked into the patch room. BOFH style. There was a cable hanging loose, that must be the one. Seeking the router reading “vlan 177.*”, snap. Hole 24 was free. In and out in 15 seconds, I silently closed the door behind me, locking it. I shut down the Beauty under my desk, silence at last. I have to makesure that prick from TechSupport is not watching when I sneak the Beauty in the server room. Wow, she sure weighs a lot. The new transport dudes at the coffee corner gave me a strange look. As if they had never seen a server. Well, they probably never had. Connecting the keyboard, mouse, network and power supply cables, and click… I fired her up. God, I love the sound of SCSI disk reving up one by one. Pure geek pleasure.

Now, lets see if the VNC service is working the way it should. I didn’t bother to put a monitor there. “Connecting to vbegn050.emea.msds.volvo.net…” YES! The “session password” prompt. It works! Now all we have to do is make sure nobody remembers the Beauty when Bite2 arrives. I’m sure it will still take ages befor they ban all non-Bite2 computers. And God knows where our Server from Hell will be by then…