Another (bigger) Crash

This week has been a test of endurance and tranquility. 

Photo by BarkIt started out innocently enough, as do most horrific weeks. Monday morning was spent going through my checks, making sure everything was ok. 

The first call was at about noon on Monday. A client's user was having trouble opening a file in their documents folder... there were indications that seemed to point to the file being corrupted. This is obviously a concern, but not earth-shattering. I'll just finish up what I'm doing and... 

The second call wasn't far behind it. This was another user. They were having trouble opening any files in their documents folder. Since the workstations on this network are configured to redirect their documents folder to a shared location, this now tells me that we have corruption on the server, in the user shared directories. Oh, crap. Now it's getting serious, and it means that everyone is affected. It's time to rearrange the schedule and... 

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Crash

What would the loss of your primary computer mean to you?

A couple of weeks ago I was at a client’s site. This client had a couple of old servers… So old, in fact, they were tan in color. Think about it… when was the last time you saw a *new* tan computer? Yep, they were that old. Or older.  We were “virtualizing” these servers into a newer server they had purchased. This means that we were converting the old tan box computers into VMWare Virtual Servers.

The intricacies of that are beyond the scope of this article. This article is about what happened while the servers were being “virtualized”.

My laptop battery had been giving me issues. By “issues” I mean that it couldn’t hold more than about a 10 minute charge. This was not a critical deal, since I basically go from electric socket to electric socket in the course of my day. So, no big deal, just plug the brick in and keep moving.

Then my power brick started having issues. Subtle at first, the laptop would act as though it had been disconnected from power. Usually re-connecting the power did the trick. Soon, the brick disconnected for longer periods. The laptop would actually hibernate to deal with it.

Finally, in the middle of this conversion, the brick quit altogether. I certainly needed my laptop for this project, but mine was now completely dead. What to do?

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