It all started on Thursday, when I was supposed to be celebrating Loos birthday. Mid afternoon the DMC server stopped serving webpages, and after a reboot stopped working all together. This concerned me as when a server blue screens you know its pretty bad.
Friday I spent most of the time on the phone with an engineer trying to repair the server, but it soon became apparent that it was dead, and needed to be reinstalled.
Loo and I left Wycombe at about 4pm and arrived in Leeds at around 10pm. It was one long journey with lots of traffic. We got a hotel near the datacentre and I left to rebuild the server. I spent a few hours installing the OS and patching it, then left as it was doing the final service pack. I returned in the morning and started to do some more work. I got a few hours work done, when I did another Windows Update. When the box restarted it blue screened again with the same error. It was down to the latest Security Rollup Package from Microsoft. Arse! So I started again, but this time didnt install the rollup package. I left the box with SQL installed and the OS patched. I got DiscoPete to test the remote connection and it worked, so I decided it was time to go home and finish it off from there.
I got home only to find I couldnt connect, and DiscoPete was doing a gig, so I couldn’t get his help. Tonight was supposed to be me birthday celebration down the pub, so I didnt need this extra stress. I was feeling pretty poorly as it was from being sat in a datacentre for hours on end.
I went to the pub and had one drink, but did have a great time cos all my friends came down. It wasn’t my birthday just yet, as it was on Monday, but it was great.
Sunday morning at 7.30 I get a call from Energis saying that my box had stopped serving webpages again, so they did a reboot. I still couldn’t access the box, so there wasn’t much that I could do. I tried to stay calm but was pretty stressed out.
Loo came to my rescue and helped keep me calm. We popped out to get some cold and flu drink and a nice walk around West Wycombe. When we got back there was a surprise waiting for me…all my friends, old and new, were waiting in the house with food and drink and birthday greetings! I was speechless and had a great time. I was so happy that they all came, and had a good time. They all chipped in to get me a