Starting With The Usual Bang

I am flying solo AND on call this week. My colleague is on vacation after working last week solo (but he was not on call) and I hope he is enjoying it. It did not appear that he had too terribly hard of a week, but any week solo is not fun.

I can only hope that Monday is not any indicator of what the rest of the week will be like. It started with the call forwarding system we use to route calls to the on call person going crazy and routing calls to Latin America (sorry Fabio and Armando) instead of me. I fixed that issue and then I was told of an issue with SAP that seemed to take our partner way too long to fix. The issue was finally resolved but the customer was not available to verify so I had to let that issue simmer until the customer gets in the office.

A little later we had an issue in Canada with a few of the RnD servers. I called the Unix guy on call and he looked into it, thinking it was a LAN issue since he could not connect to any of the servers on a particular switch. He called one of the on site people to check the switch but they could not find anything wrong. Finally he asked them to check the console that he connects to the other servers from and it was down. Once that was rebooted he could get in and check the other servers. He had them back up pretty quickly.

At close to 5:00 PM, I got another call stating that one of the oldest Windows servers we have (it is running NT 4.0) was having issues and no one could connect. The Wintel team (who is in Malaysia) could not remotely reboot it so an on site person was called in to do it but once he did it would not come back up. He tried calling me but the forwarding had messed up again and the calls were again going to Latin America. I did not find this out until this morning at 5:00 AM. I had finally gone to bed at midnight after being up 18 hours (working most of it). I yet again removed the bogus forwarding (wiping out the schedule completely, using a direct forward to my line) and now await the calls. As I sit here I still have two open cases, one most likely solved and the other one no closer to being solved than it was wen it was opened 14 hours ago. I guessed we missed the deadline on that one!

Pray for me!