I got up, and got ready as usual.

The senior DBA found the takeaway curry sitting in the room. The sysadmin had forgotten to take it, or put it in the fridge. I told him to chuck it out.

We came to work, I worked for a while, got an email from the guy I work with on the TiVo images, he'd sent me a picture of that slut Paris Hilton, at some red carpet thing, holding her dress out, and you could see her underwear going up her whatsit.

I got an email from my web host a little while later, asking how the hell I had the httpd processes running wget on his server, and I explained that I was using php to do it, and that it was a script to pull the info page of my tivo, parse it, and display the output in a little table on my home page, so people could see what my tivo was currently doing.

He wasn't terribly impressed about I could sense, so I told him I'd get rid of it if he wanted.

I finally took the plastic off my ipod. This is only of relevence, since I bought the thing about 6 months ago, and it's managed to stay on that long.

I went back to work, I got a call from the senior DBA, he was asking me about installing SP2 on a machine that keeps crashing. I told him No F Way, if it crashes now, SP2 is not going to fix it, and will most likely just make it massively worse.

I went back to work, and a little while later, we had a morning tea. My manager started out, saying that he didn't want any great long speeches (like yesterday), and we were just there to eat and socialise.

As soon as he finished, the new manager of the department who crapped on for ages yesterday turned up, and, you guessed it, crapped on for ages again.

After I escaped that, we went and had a meeting about the QLD counterpart system briefly, and then I went back to work.

Someone had left a message on my desk phone, I called up, listened to it. I have no idea who it was, it was just some great long message, with a little kid in the background somewhere, and then it hung up.

I went back to work, until I got a call from the senior DBA, there was a BBQ on today apparently, and they'd forgotten to tell me. I went out there, the others were just taking off to go off the property to smoke. I stayed near the BBQ area, had some food, and a couple of beers, while chatting to some other people at work.

We were having a discussion about the car that was in Bullit, whether it was a Mustang, or a Shelby GT etc.

A few minutes later, everyone started going back to work. I notcied that cute chick going back into work, I didn't even know that she'd been out there.

I helped the social club guy clean up, and pack up all the drinks/beers etc, and then I went back to work.

I updated the production system I'm working on, and then found a bug in the logic, which only occured when the code went into the production environment. D'oh. I quickly rushed to sort it out, putting in a kludgy fix, until I implement the new tables properly.

I got a call from the senior DBA, he wanted to know about comparing some files between servers.

I went up to find out what it was, it was that the TRIM system had been running on the disaster recovery machine while we relocated, and now a few files had ended up left on the DR machine, and not back on the production system. We had to find a way to compare them, but there's about 4GB worth of files, and the link between the servers is the same as IP over carrier pigeon, so diffing them is not an option.

I thought about it for a minute, and figured I could generate md5sums on all the files, and compare those, and then find the missing/different files.

I sat there, found md5sum for solaris (that was a task in itself), wrote a script to generate hashes for all the files, and then I copied these across, compared them, and had it generate a script to copy all the missing/different files across.

I kicked off the generated script, but it wasn't very happy, the scps kept coming back with I/O errors.

I asked if there had been something wrong with the filesystem on that machine (which might explain why the files were missing), but no one knew anything about it.

Next thing.. the DR machine disappeared. Couldn't ping it, and the sessions I had open all died. Somehow I think the machine has kernel panicked, or oops, or whatever Solaris does when it craps itself (because I don't think I've ever actually seen that happen).

We called the guy at Thornton, where the DR box is, the guy will wait for us. I went down to get my stuff organised to go, I bumped into my manager, chatted to him for a bit, and then went back up.

The sysadmin had gone to book a car, and they weren't here, so I went down where the government cars are. While we were getting the car sorted out, a cop car went flying past the front of the building, and a few seconds later a paddy wagon went racing along the back. Gees, something good must be going on.

We got in the car, and drove down the Thornton, parked, and went to try to get in the building. We got there about 6.01pm, so the access card didn't work, since it was after 6pm.

There was a cleaner in the airlock at the front, we tried to get her to open the door, but she couldn't work it out, that you had to press the switch to deactivate the electromagnet holding the door shut, and then push it open.

We eventually managed to explain how the door worked (she kept deactivating the solenoid, and then pulling the door, instead of pushing it open.

We got in, the gujy we'd called was there, we explained that the access card didn't work, but of course he didn't belive us, so then we had to spend a couple of minutes showing him that the card would not unlock the door.

We walked around to the computer "room", where the DR machine was. The door was wide open, because apparently there's something wrong with the airconditioning at the moment, and it keeps heating the room instead of cooling it. It felt like it was about 30 degrees in there.

I was led to believe there was a proper computer room here, this is just a cupboard with 2 racks in it, and a standard home air conditioner split system.

I plugged a monitor into the DR machine, but there was no output, it must have rebooted itself, and it's running in serial mode, since there was no keyboard attached when it booted.

The sysadmin had his laptop, he gave me the sun console lead, and I plugged it in. Yep, the machine had come back up in serial mode, single user mode too, because of the disk errors.

I pinched a keyboard off the server that controls the security access (since the others hanging around were all ps/2, and the sun box only takes usb input devices), I plugged that in, but it didn't make any difference, not that I expected it to.

The sysadmin kicked of a fsck on the stuffed filesystem, but didn't specify -y, so it was coming up about fixing every error, and there were tons of them.

The sysadmin had wandered off, so that left me sitting there typing "y, enter" constantly.

The sysadmin came back, and I left him sit there dealing with typing y, and I went and sat outside the "room", since it was so hot in there.

The fsck went through for a while without finding any errors, so we didn't have to type "y", and then because there was no input, the laptop suspended itself, and wouldn't come back.

We had to reboot it, we pulled the serial cable out first though, to avoid the "break" signal getting sent to the sun box (though I've had that happen when you unplug the cable), and waited for the laptop to come back up again.

We connected to the machine again, and the output of fsck continued. When it eventually finished, I suggested running it again, because the sysadmin had kept pressing "enter" to stop the laptop from suspending again, which results in the default answer of "no", to fsck's questions, so there would be some problems that hadn't been fixed.

He started it again, this time with -y, though it didn't work, and still asked for confirmation. I went and sat outside the "room" again.

The guy from Thornton came around, and started going on about the air conditioning problems etc. Finally the fsck finished again (it took about 20 minutes each time), and we rebooted the box.

Because the keyboard/monitor were attached, it came up on the machine this time, not on the console port. It looked like it booted up fine.

I took the keyboard off, and put it back on the security server, and then unplugged the monitor, and plugged it back into the machine it originally came from.

While I was doing this, the others had packed up the laptop, and wandered off.

I had a quick look around for them, stopping to get a drink from the spring water thing in the hall.

I noticed they had a lab in there, with fume cupboards. I couldn't see the certification stickers through the window in the door, but they must have been certified.

I found the others, we had a quick chat, and then we left, got back in the car, and drove back to Maitland. On the way back, some idiot was tailgating us, and we changed lanes to let him passed, he went speeding past, and then just dropped back to the same speed as us, so what was the point of that?

We got back to the office at 6.30pm, the sysadmin went in to drop off the folder for the car, and the senior DBA and I left, drove back to the pub we're staying at.

We dropped of our stuff, and then just sat in the room for a while. Some guy had fallen asleep in front of the tv in the common area, near our room, and started snoring.

We left the room, and were going to go across to the other pub, where we start drinking, but we bumped into the sysadmin on the steps.

We decided to go to the Clubhouse instead, when we got there, we saw the bartender was back (the guy who used to be the Newcastle Knight).

We played pool, I was playing like crap, must not have had enough to drink yet.

Some weird guy in the bar challenged a game of pool, I wasn't really interested, but I agreed to play anyway, and then after a couple of shots, he asked if I wanted to make the game for a schooner.

Not really, if I lose, I get to buy him a beer, if I win, I get a shitty beer I don't want. Oh well, it's only $3, who cares.

I lost the game terribly, so the guy asked if I wanted to play best 2 out of 3, said it didn't make any difference to me, he had ime to fill in apparently.

We setup the second game, and a few shots in, the weird guy was served his dinner, so I just waited, chatting to the guys from work while he ate.

When he finished, we finished the game, I was beaten again, but it was fairly close this time, I only had a couple of balls left on the table at the end.

We played a third game, even though he'd already won. He stuffed up this time, and sunk the black early on, so I picked a new black ball, and we kept playing, then my dinner was served.

We were pretty close to finishing, so we finished the game (again), like the second game, it was close, I only had a couple of balls left.

I shouted the guy a beer, and then I sat and ate my dinner.

After dinner, I went into play the pokies, I put a dollar in, and immediately won $6, so I just took it all out of the machine, and left.

We hung around for a little while, and then all walked back to the pub we're staying at. A few of us wanted to chat, so they were standing around chatting, while I watched the tv in the window of Radio Rentals.

I fired up the laptop, typed some blog, and then went to bed.