Blog post #150 - Great start to the week

Quite apart from Monday having been dreadful, Monday evening was eventful too. The Phase 1 upgrade to Exchange Server 2007 was not helped by Windows doing a reboot on me and sticking itself in DOS mode. Try RDPing to that...

It was 9.40pm so I gave up for the evening.

One of the staff phoned me just after 10pm to alert me that "the email server is down". Funnily enough, so was I. Down, sleeping, tired and alarm set for 5am.

Dutifully I got on site as fast as possible (about 6.30). Only once I had opened the first door did I remember that despite numerous requests, I am still missing a key to the inner door that was changed a few years ago. Standing on the doorstep like a plum, I had to wait until the man came to unlock the building - boy was he surprised to see a leather clad biker with the front door open.

Completed the Windows section easily enough but the ATTO Celerity fibre HBA wouldn't talk to Windows and the RAID array sitting on that was a code 10 too. Not a good start with an Exchange server - guess where the databases live.

After playing with Windows update for a while and getting new drivers that wouldn't start I got the Celerity going which just left the array. Code 10, won't start. After a dutiful ponder and since time was marching on, I popped off to the Celerity site and got hold of some drivers, downloaded them (why are the critical downloads always on sites that are connected with a wet piece of string?) and installed them. Yet another restart and the ATTO was happy and the array was visible.

Woo hoo. 9.15am and the punters are arriving and phoning me up.

Exchange still not running - Exchange started before the array driver was loaded. I could stop and restart all Exchange services but let's do things properly - another full restart and a 7 minute breath hold. 9.24am and Outlook finally responds to me.

Job list:
Get Blackberry online
Ensure that Exchange plays forward the logs
Ensure the bridgehead flushes the emails in the queue up to the Exchange server
Backup the server - heck, see if backup works first!
Test email
Document what I did and copy the installers to my installer set in case I need to do it again
Get someone to make me a cuppa

Oh and change the plaster on my finger where I dropped a terminal server into its rail set and squished myself. Now it has added blood. :-)