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2001-10-25 - 8:39 p.m.
Crash

DANG, it's windy! Like, so windy it's reminding me of Kansas. Stuff is blowing all over out there....and of course, tomorrow is trash day, so all the recycling is blowing all over the neighborhood. I elected to wait until next time to put my magazines out.

Scored more brownie points with the boss today. About three o'clock, Tiny Shorts starts ranting about AudioVault. "It's not working, it just gave me an error message then crashed. If we had a second station on the air right now it wouldn't be on the air, it's all P's (the engineer) fault if he would fix stuff...blah blah blah....why do we have to have the hard drives in another room...someone can't stand the hum...being a prima donna....rant rant rant". So I stood up and went into the equipment room, where the servers are, and checked things out...hmm...the time sync with NPR isn't working, and we're getting these odd error messages. I think we need to reboot the whole system. Meanwhile, TS is still ranting and raving and blaming P for everything that was ever wrong in the universe.

Now, the problem with rebooting the Vault is that we use it all day long...on the air, in production, catching recordings. So there's never a good time for it to go down. But if we didn't get it working, things were just going to get worse. I asked TS to grab a tape and catch the program we were missing since the vault was down, (which he didn't do) and called the engineer.

And got his voice mail.

Sooo. Went in search of the boss, who had gone off in search of special coffee. Very well then. He will be back soon, I'll just get to work. TS is still being no help at all. "TS, do you know where the instructions are for a reboot?" "NO. P probably hid them because he thinks we shouldn't have access to them." (Talk about pulling paranoia out of your ass.)

What I REALLY wanted to do was strangle TS, but that wouldn't get the Vault up, now would it? Finally, he got tired of his ranting, and said he was "so pissed off" he was going to go home. YAY! I tried the engineer again. No dice. I plunged into the reboot to the best of my ability, just as the boss came in. I explained the situation, and he basically stood back and gave me moral support. And called the other engineer. (P, the one TS hates) P coached me through the rest of it, even though he must have thought he was talking to an idiot part of the time. "AVB. What are you talking about?" "F12? It's not working. Oh. Wait. Now it is. OK, now what?"

Bottom line....*I* kept my cool, figured out what needed to be done, and plunged in to fix it. And it turns out, I was right on track.....as P was coaching me, it turned out that everything was working fine. Boss was impressed, and said so in front of people. (yay me) I thanked him for staying in the room with me....I think the moral support was important.

And the thing is, we all figured the reason for the crash was probably a couple of power glitches we took during the storms last night....even though it's on a UPS, we took several of those little hits...on/off/on/off right in a row, and that probably scrambled it's brains just enough to crash it today. For a computer system that runs all the time, especially on a Windows platform, it's remarkably stable. Beloved uses the same system at his stations, and they reboot once a month or so. We reboot when there's a crash....I think that's probably not a good idea.

So--what is audiovault? It's an audio storage/production/automation system. It's way cool. It's pretty much the heartbeat of the radio station, and when it's down, it's bad. Audiovault for more info.

Was that totally boring? I know, people deal with crashing servers all the time. But not with TS ranting in their ears....I think his problem is that he doesn't understand how it works well enough to try to approach fixing the problem....so he gets angry. (I can relate...I was getting that way with Excel yesterday.....) We also have some problems with the CYBEX unit in one studio....he was "fixing" the problem by disconnecting the power cord. Nice, but the power isn't the problem....the connection to the monitor is...that's the one that needs a GENTLE jiggle. And if he could just grok for a moment HOW the thing works, and what the problem is.....that's the conclusion he'd draw.

ARGH. But at least I'm scoring points with the boss...

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