It's been a while since I posted, so here's a quick capsule:
Thursday at work we were visited by a tech from the backup company I have ranted about before (CA BrightStorEB), and we came up with 14 'issues' that he entered work items for, two of which were critical and to be immediately shuttled high in the tech support chain. No calls yet, by the way.
Friday we had a partial meltdown of the same backup system - I got it going again, and this time changed some defaults to try and make it more stable. We'll see.
Saturday we went xmas shopping and cataloging - bought a lot of stuff for ourselves, and scratched the top of the xmas list.
Sunday we went xmas shopping and did a bit better - got about half the list done. Or at least nearly done.
Today I swapped out all of the tapes in the library, the changes I made Friday apparently worked, as we had a stable backup over the weekend. I also changed half the jobs to do the backups in TAR format instead of brightstor format. Just so we can (hopefully) get the data back if brightstor decides to stop reading the tapes again. I say half because I alternate days and have two jobs for each server, so over the space of two days, I get two complete backups on two separate sets of tapes. The second set will now be in TAR format.
Over the weekend, I finished Counter Hack and began where I left off with a book I was reading over a year ago - I found my old metal bookmark, by the way. 'The Pole Shift' is basically a bunch of pseudo-science mixed with prophecy and psychic revelations that apparently all agree that in the year 2000 or 2001 the earth will rotate 180 degrees about its axis when the crust slips around the core, causing massive earthquakes, ice ages, volcanic destruction, and other mayhem. This is supposed to be a warning to take action to stop the depletion of the ozone layer and stop polluting the ocean because this is somehow responsible for the Pole Shift. I find myself skipping through entire sections, so I estimate the entire 400pp book will be done sometime tomorrow. Not impressed.
