benlog

One thing that I find makes certain online journals more interesting than others is some kind of typical topic. There’s something to be said for just day-in-the-life kinds of posts, but when someone often posts with a little more direction it increases my interest level. I haven’t been able to do that here. When I started this up again I was in a JavaScript kind of mood, so I made some posts about that and then kind of thought that might be something I could post about frequently. Now I haven’t really done anything exciting with JavaScript in a long time and similarly I haven’t posted anything here in a long time.

If I get my act together and register for curling this fall, though, then maybe I’ll have a more steady topic for some published thoughts.

My biography, or perhaps memoirs, are tentatively titled Cannibalism for the Rest of Us.

A week ago today was Memorial Day here in the US, which means the weekend leading up to then was Memorial Weekend. Apparently some people want to restore Memorial Day (nee Decoration Day) to a static May 30th, but until that happens we enjoy an automatic long weekend. It is a time officially set aside to honor those who died while in military service for our country, although for the most part it seems to be family and friends barbecue day. I’m not writing about that.

On the preceding Friday afternoon, the main server for work had a disk failure. This is a server with plenty of backup goodness like a RAID-5 disk array. That should mean we can lose a whole disk and everything will be just fine. So I went home after work and mowed the lawn knowing that the good folks at the data center were working to bring it back to life. By late Friday it was clear things were not going to be just fine, as they had replaced the bad disk and were now getting strange error messages from the disk controller. They were going to try a few things over night, and I went to bed. Saturday morning came with no success. I made the call to let the boss know what was up and it was decided that a server house-call might be in order.

We have two of these servers, normally set up to mirror each other, one in California somewhere and one in Tampa. I say normally set up to mirror each other because the backup server was in the slow process of being rebuilt after it had problems with the (identical) RAID card earlier. So, as Saturday evening approached I booked a ticket to Tampa for that night. I arrived in Tampa at midnight armed with a replacement RAID card and three bottles of water. No one from the data center could pick me up, so I grabbed a taxi and found my way there. The data center is in a strip mall, inside a huge converted furniture store. There are still signs for different departments, although doors and rooms have been added. Many, many doors, all with electronic card locks.

I went to work on the server there, but by 6 am when I had no luck I just grabbed all the drives from the server, put in a new one with a bare operating system on it so we could at least do something with the server later, and was on my way back to the airport. Took off about 8:30 Sunday morning and got back to town around 11 or so. Slept for a few hours and then I was on my way for help working with the drives I brought back with me. With some great technical help from a friend who runs a great hosting business, we spent about 6 hours poking and prodding the drives. The RAID card thought everything was OK, but would fail whenever trying to regenerate the array. Finally, somewhere around Midnight Sunday we started a raw copy of the last 120 GB or so of the disks to another (non-RAID) drive. Some sleep was had after that.

Monday, Memorial Day, morning, I started looking through what we had managed to copy. Essentially we had a single 120 GB file and buried within that was the data I needed to get to. Through some magic and very good luck, I located a smaller, 6 GB section of that data which mostly corresponded to a backup of what I was looking for. It was still a very slow process and so in order to be operational by Tuesday morning I switched to just getting enough restored on the bare box back in Tampa to run the server software.

At some point on Monday I had dinner at my parents’ — it was a barbecue style dinner.

Then Monday night up to about 6:30 am on Tuesday I rebuilt the server software. From there I started working on processing that smaller chunk of data, and by Tuesday night I had extracted a large and important piece. I pretty much had to sleep for a bit at that point. From there things started to go fairly well. By last Friday nearly everything was restored, and I was once again able to sleep more than one night for every other day.

From Friday night to Thursday I felt sick. It was a great combination of stress, disappointment, lack of sleep, lack of food, etc. This was about as close to killing our company as you could come and manage to survive. Thousands of elementary, middle, and high school kids have their work stored on our server, and it’s my responsibility to make sure this doesn’t happen. Yikes. We’re back to having a working backup server, and I’m adding a third off-site nightly backup, too.

I’ve been more or less involved with people who think, talk, and research about education for a pretty long time now. Since I’ve been slightly on the outside of that, or at least placed my own thinking as somewhat removed from the actual education process, it’s been interesting to observe the changing key words and phrases that are required to be used in such discussions. Some good examples are authentic learning, student artifacts, and there are many more.

I started writing this in order to complain about ajax. When I first discovered that making interactive and dynamic web pages using JavaScript, CSS, and DOM had a new name, I thought it was pretty silly. I remember the DHTML (or do I mean dhtml?) craze, although I never did much with it at the time. That only slightly preceded the tipping point of Flash, and was only slightly less annoying when trying to find Content on a website. I’ve come around quite a bit to accept the ability of a new title for something to have an important effect, although I do still question if the effect in this case is necessarily positive. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I just don’t like the name. It’s not that it’s a household cleaner, it just sounds bad to me. It’s abrasive or something.

I also planned to complain about blog, which is short for weblog. If I remember correctly, weblog became the new name of web journals sometime around 1999. Just about all of my computer-enthused friends where updating their homepages nearly daily - as a sort of online journal - starting around 1995. I don’t mean to say that in a, “in my day, we walked to school up-hill, both ways,” kind of a thing, just as an example of a thing people did under a different name, that got a new name for no good reason. At least blog sounds better than ajax.

Next up… blogging about ajaxing on my nlog.

This is me, posting to my nlog.