September 17, 2008

• Ike Day 3 - Setting Up Servers and wondering if I'll have a house tomorrow

  I didn’t want to get up, but if there was ever a day I needed to, this was it. Gotta go set up the servers, Tom ... gotta go set up the servers. I was exhausted.

   

  During setup I discovered my power wasn’t on and my network cable wasn’t live in my cabinet. I put in support requests and both issues were handled within an hour. Meanwhile I arranged servers and routers in the cabinet. It’s a 24 x 36 x 84” space – not very large, but just enough for my nine servers, some of which were designed to be mounted in a rack, and others which are more like normal desktop PCs in size and shape. By 11am mail delivery was restored, and by 1pm everything was up and running.

   

    

   

  At this point, my Houston customers were still up and so I verified connectivity to their VPN’s as well. All was working.

   

  So I went out for my favorite comfort food: a Burger King chicken sandwich, fries, and a coke. The original kind. Mm, mm, good. Hit the spot just right.

   

  I stopped by an Office Depot to pick up a firewall for one of my webservers, to substitute for one I’d accidentally left in Houston. Luckily it was one with a simple purpose and configuration – simply to block everything except access to the web services port. Easy enough to configure and readily available.

   

  I decided to wait on setting up tape drives, for backup, until the next day.

   

  We all went and had some dinner – me and Steph, Luke and Leia, and JaiLyn, Steph’s sister. One of my favorite things about Dallas is El Fenix restaurant. Absolutely outstanding Tex Mex. I think they got started way back in 1918. Anyway, it’s my other favorite comfort food. Since Don Bravo closed down, anyway.

   

  When we got back to the room we turned the TV on. Everything was all about “here comes Ike.” We watched as they predicted it would roll up just west of the Houston Ship Channel, placing Baytown in the northeast quadrant, for maximum damage potential.

   

  So then I couldn’t sleep. The track kept shifting. “We think it might go here” … “now we think it might go here” …. and each shift was just enough to potentially save or doom my house.

   

  Meanwhile I watched my remote web cam I had left running in my office. It showed all was well, until about 2am, when it went out suddenly. This indicated I had lost my internet connection, not power. If I’d just lost power, the UPS would have kept the camera running and I’d see a mostly dark room. But the camera just stopped responding suddenly, so I  knew my T1 had gone down.

   

  And internally, I  prepared myself to wake up in the morning and find out I didn’t have a house anymore. I often do that  - consider the worst possible outcome I can imagine, then pre-accept it.  Another outcome I considered was that the house was still there but had so much damage it would take months to repair, and that the insurance company would be difficult to work with.

   

  I stayed up until 3am when I couldn’t keep my eyes open any more. In fact, I don’t know what time I fell asleep.

   

  • 7:02 pm
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