Co-lo's and UFO's?

What a day it's been so far. The first part, relaxing, get some stuff down around the house, shake off the mild hangover from last night, take a nap and plan out what is next after the co-lo visit. Co-lo is short for co-location, it's a data center where my friend Brian keeps his servers for The Linux Fix, a hosting business he runs. The co-lo visit was supposed to be short, like a hour to swap drives, copy data, toss new drives in and rebuild a server. Brian would be doing this himself if he were local to the area and not in California being covered in a smoky shroud from all the forest fires.

So the downtime starts at 3:00, I find the new drives that got shipped to the co-lo and the box feels like it has loose bricks in it. Crap, I know that at least one of these is going to have a problem with the terrible packing job. Next the data copy takes two hours, double crap. Hit a Chinese grocery store while waiting and find some good eats, along with a terrible smell and raw shrimp for sale, uncovered right on the check out counter! Go back to the co-lo, get a call that it's taking forever so I take a nap in the back of my car. While waking up I see a spot floating toward a cloud, strange. Ten minutes later I see another spot floating along in the distance, but this one is reflective. Area 51 or a mylar balloon? My guess, there is a three year old crying that his balloons are gone. :)

The copy is now done, but only one out of three of the new drives work. Triple crap. Next, I didn't mark what drive came from what slot and server. Quadruple crap! Figure out which drive is Slot 0 for each server, cool we are rolling. Bleep bleep, cell phone battery dies. Crap to the eighth power! One array is now rebuilding fine, the other server is however not happy. I arrive home at 7:30, grab my phone charger, toss a spare battery in it and call Brian. His power is flashing on and off now, probably due to the fires that are starting to surround hi town in Northern Cali.

So now I await the call to drive back to Troy, hopefully Brian has power and isn't a crispy piece of bacon. My prayers go out to everyone in Northern California, 40,000 acres just burning away as I type.