Journal Sylver Dragon's Journal: Working at 3am 1
I got a call late this morning. It's an adjunct faculty member. Apparently, she was just informed that she would be teaching a specific class, starting tomorrow, and wanted to find out if the lab was set up for it. Now, in this case there are no lab computers, each student uses his or her own laptop which is provided by the University for the program. After telling her this, and asking, "what class?!?" she sends me a document detailing the system requirements. It's not terrible, and I figure about half the class is currently good to go, the problem is, the other half's systems are going to need some work before tomorrow morning (technically, this morning, now). So, send out the mass email, "Please bring your system by and it will be vetted, and made right." And wait for the flood of students. Sure enough about 4pm nine of them show up with system in hand. Now, I expected I would be working late, that happens, it's part of being in IT. As I roll though checking and prepping systems, I have 2 start acting funny. Both are borking on the last step. This step actually involves installing MS SQL Express 2005.
Turns out that the first one had a corrupted WMI service, with the rights for it way out of whack. How it got this way, I'll never know, but I at least had figured that out and fixed it by 10pm.
This other one though, has not been so nice. It's now 3am, and I still have yet to figure the source of the problem out. The install goes beautifully, right up until the installer tries to start the sqlexpress service, and then it just hangs. If I let it sit for about 20 minutes it will finally time out and state that it failed to start. The install then fails and I am back to scratching my head. As I write this, I am waiting on that timeout again; seems that the latest attempt to fix the issue didn't do any better than the last few. Unfortunately, the student will need the system first thing in the morning, or I'd set it aside and go home and sleep for a while.
I'll be the first to admit that late nights are just in the cards for IT folk, but it still doesn't make these nights any less annoying. Ever just have one of those nights where nothing seems to fix the problem, and the hours are slipping by unnoticed? Take some time and share, after all misery loves company. ;-)
Turns out that the first one had a corrupted WMI service, with the rights for it way out of whack. How it got this way, I'll never know, but I at least had figured that out and fixed it by 10pm.
This other one though, has not been so nice. It's now 3am, and I still have yet to figure the source of the problem out. The install goes beautifully, right up until the installer tries to start the sqlexpress service, and then it just hangs. If I let it sit for about 20 minutes it will finally time out and state that it failed to start. The install then fails and I am back to scratching my head. As I write this, I am waiting on that timeout again; seems that the latest attempt to fix the issue didn't do any better than the last few. Unfortunately, the student will need the system first thing in the morning, or I'd set it aside and go home and sleep for a while.
I'll be the first to admit that late nights are just in the cards for IT folk, but it still doesn't make these nights any less annoying. Ever just have one of those nights where nothing seems to fix the problem, and the hours are slipping by unnoticed? Take some time and share, after all misery loves company.
Working at 3am More Login
Working at 3am
Slashdot Top Deals