September 17, 2008
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Ike - Day 2 (Helter Skelter)
The alarm went off. I felt dead tired and a little hung over. I tumbled downstairs in a stupor to check the latest hurricane tracks. They all continued to confirm the news. I finalized my arrangements with Colo4Dallas, answered some emails from customers, and sent out an email to customers letting them know the servers would shut down at 12:30.
There’s something very unpleasant about dismantling a carefully organized and constructed installation of servers. It suggests there was something wrong with how it was put together, when in fact, it was all put together and working just fine. It’s breaking something, on purpose, that was in no need of repairs, and causing it to be unavailable for some unknown period of time.
One can only hope the downtime is less than 24 hours, but when you’re evacuating because of an approaching hurricane, you just don’t know what kind of traffic you’ll encounter.
So there I was: pulling every cable out of every server. Except two servers. One of my clients asked me to leave their servers in place. They assist in organizing emergency services and were willing to risk a long outage when the hurricane hit and power went out, because they wanted to keep their data available until the last minute, preparing for when the hurricane hit.
So, I had to do everything I could to avoid disturbing any of their power or network connections. This presented a challenge: I’d have to leave my main network switch in place. I needed a switch in Dallas! I checked my stock and discovered I had a spare I could take with me. Whew.
I had the van pulled up to the back door and began stacking servers by it. I packed cables and small equipment such as tape drives into large duffle bags. Rush, rush, rush. Meanwhile Stephanie rushed to get clothes and everything else packed that we’d need for a week away. The clock was ticking and every moment made me more nervous about what traffic we’d encounter.
Finally, everything was loaded in the car and van. The dog didn’t want to go in the back of the car. Everybody had to make last minute runs into the house for things they remembered they forgot. It was about 3pm when we rolled out.
The first thing we tried to do was stop for gas and snacks. Station #1 had no gas. Station #2 had no gas. Station #3 had no gas. At this point we reconsidered the 20 gallons of gas I had stored in the garage for the manual gas generators. We decided to go back and get it. On the way in, we stopped at one more station – a convenience store – and discovered it still had gas! So we filled up, but still stopped back by the house to pick up the 4 gas cans to take as spare gas.
I’ve never carried gas cans on top of my van, even though it has luggage racks and I’ve evacuated before … I just wasn’t sure enough of my ability to tie it down securely and not go, you know, ending up on the news in a massive fireball. Steph’s sister had done it before and convinced me we could do it. A bunch of bungee cables later, the cans seemed secure.
During the trip I discovered this is the best way to get respect when driving a minivan. Attach four gas cans to the top of the luggage rack. Who wants to have a collision with that?? All the big SUV’s and ricers have never driven so carefully around me. Ever.
It was now 4pm. I absolutely dreaded the thought of the traffic we might hit.
My special route took us north-north-east out of Baytown, then brought us around parallel to 45, finally rejoining 45 right around Huntsville. Traffic generally moved relatively well, with the exception of when we drove through 2 small towns that were also evacuating.
As we drove through the first town, national guard and police were directing traffic. As we passed one police officer he looked at the top of my van and began walking toward. Uh oh, I thought … he’s going to tell me I’m nuts and lock me up for competing for “most likely to end up as an evacuating fireball.” But he didn’t … instead, he shouted out in a deep Texas drawl, as I drove by, “now THAT’S the right idea!”
After we joined 45, traffic moved steadily at paces between 25 mph and 65 mph. There was a LOT of traffic on the road but it was all moving. We stopped at a station for gas and found they still had supreme left but that was all. We topped off our tanks with supreme, bought snacks for dinner, and moved along.
About 10pm we arrived in Dallas at the hotel. They had our reservation. We got moved in. With my last desperate grasp at consciousness I made DNS changes and IP translation tables to prepare for the servers to go live as soon as possible after I could plug them in at the colocation facility.
Then I crashed.
