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May 31, 2007
My Day at Work
Sorry to bore you with this but:
The phone rang at 6:30 this morning. It was the land line and I let it ring as I had no idea where either of the handsets were and I really wasn't too worried about who might be calling. I had an idea.
When the cell phone rang, and it was laying next to me in bed, I knew I was right. It was work.
The NetWare server was kicking up "sys volume out of space" errors and placing said warning on every computer in the building. I logged in from home and started deleting some files. I combined this activity with watching the drive refill itself with temp files. This same friggin' thing had happened about a year ago.
It was my recollection that if the sys volume filled up that NetWare would crash. That's a memory from NetWare 3.12 and I wasn't sure if it was still true or, maybe, even just a bad memory. I know the server hadn't crashed, it had just become very annoying.
Still, I changed that memory to "NetWare won't boot if the sys volume is full." Which is what kept me from, an hour later, having a buddy of mine reboot the server. I wanted to be on-site for that process and that couldn't happen until I got the kids off to school.
Which I did.
I was at work just before 8:30.
I have a 1/2 gig database file that I could have easily deleted had it not been locked as "in use." The 1/2 gig of temp files that seemed to be coming out of nowhere were also "in use" and undeletedable.
I had a 400-meg directory that was created during a service pack install two or three years ago and that was deletable so I zapped it. As I watched the sys volume refill itself I issued the "down bitch" command at the server console (we use a "street" version of NetWare 6.x) and then did a reboot. I figured I'd take a look at the temp files that were problematic following the reboot. The problem is, they all disappeared. Whatever was impolite enough write temp files to my sys volume (and this is obviously something I need to reconfigure) was sweet enough to clean up after itself.
Just as this had been taken care of a coworker came in and reported a "Windows Protection Error" on his system. I asked him to reboot and told him I'd be out in a minute. He had a Windows 98 machine and following his reboot it came back to the error again. It did the same for me. Twice.
I took the PC to my office and it booted fine. This is not as uncommon an occurrence as you might think. Still, I removed some things that would otherwise run at startup. I booted the PC a couple more times. I took it out to the user and, of course, I got the error. I tried booting without the programming peripheral plugged in, without the mouse, I changed the keyboard, I unplugged the network cable. I took the case off and remade all the connections in the case. I still got the error. I took it back to my office.
It booted just fine. But it booted to a really, really high resolution. I'd noticed this the first time but didn't want to piddle with the user's settings, even though I wondered how he worked with icons that small. I tried to reset the resolution, but each time I tried to tweak the display settings I got an error. So, I booted in Safe Mode, made the changes there, booted in regular mode and set things to 800 x 600. The PC continued to work for the user, away from the Field of IT Magic that encompasses my office. Due to the way Safe Mode handles the display I was never able to find out what the resolution had been set to.
Then I had a meeting for two hours.
Back from the meeting I went to get a quote for a new PC. This is when I found out our Internet service was down. I checked the few things in the building there is to check. I looked out front for a backhoe (the item that caused our last outage). I called Time Warner.
The tech had me do a couple of things (things I'd already tried but sometimes they work better when a tech tells you to do them) that didn't help. He said he'd bump me up to level two support and gave me a case number. As I waited on hold I continued to click the refresh button on my browser.
After about five minutes of being on hold and clicking refresh Google popped up. After about five minutes and one second the phone picked up, "Tech support, how can I help you."
He ran some tests anyway.
(I did some other things, but those were the highlights. Jeez. I should read that before I go to bed … it's a real snoozer.)
Posted by delmer at May 31, 2007 9:32 PM
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