Just My Luck
Chapter 6

Copyright© 2010 by Barneyr

I called Nicole and Tammy separately, and said that I had all the paperwork set up for them to become employees of RHR Consulting. They could come see me when they had the time. I called Mike and let him know that within the month I wouldn't need him so much, although I might want him to train the girls some the next time I was gone so they knew the routine.

I worked on some preliminary stuff for that group in Ohio and called Mary Herman up and got more details of what they wanted. I said I could be up there Monday, as long as some emergency didn't come up between now and then. I then finished up some other projects I was working on and had the whole afternoon free, or so I thought.

After finishing my projects for the day I called Sherman, my accountant, about my win on Mega Millions. He asked me for my ticket number and said he would see how this would work, whether it might be best to take the annuity or the cash payout. He would be getting back with me.

I got a call from UT-Dallas and thanked me for the information on Kincaid. This was the first they had heard about his fraud. He had taken several classes but not to the extent of what I saw on his transcript. He had never graduated from there and although he had taken several computer science courses, his grades were not that good. When he left school in his sophomore year, he had a GPA of 2.5 over all, out of a possible 4.0, but 2.9 in his computer science classes. I told them I had a good phone number for him but I wasn't sure about the address he gave me. They thanked me again and we hung up. Weird that someone would try to pass themselves off as something they weren't.

I received a frantic call from a firm in California, asking, well really begging, to see if I could hop on a plane and come out there and straighten out a mess that some disgruntled employee had done to their computer room. The guy went berserk in there throwing things and breaking others. These guys were a real big customer for me so I quickly called Mike, he couldn't make it on such short notice, so I called Tammy, could she come babysit my servers for me until either Mike could come in or I got back?

Tammy said, "Bob, I have just finished my last class for the week, I'll be right over as soon as I can. I can bring my homework with me and finish it there. Will Mike be able to help out at all until you get back? I have class first thing Monday Morning."

"Mike said he could help out. His number is on the wall in my office on a sheet of emergency numbers. I will tell you everything I can before I have to leave for Oxnard."

"Ok Bob, I'm on my way to the dorm so I can pack some clothes for staying over until Monday.

"You might want to keep a bag packed for just such emergencies, like I do. I usually have enough packed for a week's stay. That way if I have to stay that long I'm prepared, usually it's a couple of days, but this one looks like I may end up flying straight from Oxnard to Dayton, Ohio, without coming home. I might postpone Ohio until Tuesday, we'll see after I get to see the mess in Oxnard. I'll know more about my schedule by then. I was wondering if you could test out on any of your classes, same for Nicole. Maybe you can talk to your instructors and explain the problem and see if they can help you two out. If they can, it would sure take a real load off me. See ya soon."

I hung up and called DFW to see how soon I could get a flight out to Oxnard. I couldn't get one to Oxnard directly but I could get one to Santa Barbara and I could rent a car there and drive down, it wasn't that far. So I set that up and canceled the trip to Dayton and called Mary. I told her I might not make it to her on Monday as I had an emergency in Oxnard, but I would try to fly directly back to Dayton from there if things took too long. She said Tuesday would work for her too if I needed the extra time out in California.

I hurriedly repacked my suitcase for a week's stay away from home. I wrote out some instructions for Tammy and I was so glad I had finished up the design work for those two groups in Colorado too. I left instructions on how to upload each website and somehow just knew that Tammy could handle everything fine. I hoped that she and Nicole could test out so they could start right away as the business was picking up too fast for just me to handle it alone, even with Mike's help.

My flight wasn't until two-thirty so I had plenty of time to get there. Tammy showed up and I ran her through everything I could think of that she would need. I left with her telling me to hurry up and leave before I missed my flight. I guess I would have to trust my new employees or give this all up and just travel, god knows I have enough money to do that.

The trip out was horrible; we hit storms over New Mexico all the way to Arizona. There was a back-up in the greater LAX area which affected Santa Barbara too. When I finally did get down the only car available was a sub compact and once I explained to the brain dead surfer behind the counter that I couldn't fit into one, I went next door to a different rental place and ended up with a new Camero. At least I fit in that one and it had a GPS system built in. I plugged in the address and off we went. By the time I got to Oxnard it was two hours after my flight landed which was an hour late too. By now it was nine pm their time and I called my client and he said please come and see if I could help straighten out the mess.

I got to their building and had the guard let me in and he showed me to the fifth floor where the computer rooms were. I walked in and it looked like a war zone. There were computer pieces everywhere. Most of the racks were upright, but some of them were beyond repair. There were several racks with cables hanging loose that had been torn out or cut and then there were probably ten racks that had been brutally attacked. It looked like someone had taken some kind of heavy object and smashed the servers inside and then ripped the cabling completely out of the racks. Cat 6 patch cables and fiber optic cables were lying all over the floor and hanging from the ceiling tile grid. Probably over half of the ceiling tiles were down, broken or laying all around the floor.

I immediately cornered the IT supervisor, Jerry Garcia, and asked him if he had enough people to make up three teams. "First, Jerry, we needed every data cabling company that will respond to you, to get over here as soon as possible to start repairing the fiber optic cables and rerunning any cabling that cannot be re-terminated. If we can move certain servers and switches to a lower position in a rack or a different rack, then we could re-terminate the cabling. Now most places pull more cable than is needed and there is usually some slack in the floor or the ceiling. We need to first see if we can move the equipment to a newer location, if not then we have to see how much slack we have and go accordingly. In that way we have less cabling to rerun. We absolutely need to make sure that all the documentation for what goes where is correct and up to date. Double check the addresses with the logs from the switches. Next we need materials like jumper and patch cables, fiber splice material. This is why we need the data cabling people.

"Do you have a list of emergency numbers for all your equipment suppliers; you know Cisco, HP, IBM, Sun, Nokia, AT&T. How about data cabling companies that know your building and your system?"

"Bob I have already gotten a hold of all the engineers and the two cabling companies that we use. Both of them are qualified fiber optic companies. Also, on this floor, we always run a minimum of six feet extra on all cables, so we should have plenty. We only run about half of the cabling under the floor, this is for the bottom half of the server racks and switches. Everything that sits more than two feet off the floor runs through cable trays in the ceiling. Also we just ordered some new patch cables so sitting in my office are over a thousand new patch cables of various lengths from six to twenty-five feet. Any equipment we have installed here is now represented by their company's computer engineers, so that part is covered as well. Now how do we fix this mess?"

"Ok, Jerry, next we need a team to start going through all the servers and switches to make sure they all work. Those that don't, make sure they are labeled and then put them aside and put the name and address on that white board over there on the wall.

"Jerry, then we need to have the sequence of events for start-up, what has to come up first and so on down the line. Anything that is dependent on some other piece of equipment or source, will have to wait for the other source to come up first. Get your best people to build the hierarchy of what has to come online when, in the start-up.

"Next, we can get some of this going again once we get all the preliminary and essential sources online. We can take many of the servers and use them for double duty. Once the servers can talk with the network, we can set up virtual images of the other servers and remotely boot up each system to a sufficient level to allow a rebuild of data from the backup tapes. We need to dial up VMWare and get some emergency licenses and dump everything from the backups to virtual images and we can be up and running. We might be slow, but we will be up. As you may know you can run about 20 to 25 physical servers in virtual space on a single server. But we need to try to do that only for the totally fried servers.

"To get more stuff running, we need to cannibalize memory, drives, and anything we can use from broken servers, computers, anything and anywhere we can get it. We also need some monitors, but I am sure you are already on that.

I cobbled together a computer from all the pieces and parts and set up a station. I had to use my laptop, as all the monitors were broken. Then I set about taking all the broken servers and seeing if anything could be saved from the mess of the drives. Once I got some cobbled together towers going I started setting things up so that tomorrow we could get replacement servers and start downloading what I had saved into the new servers. This was a real mess.

I worked until the big boss, Dale Dodson came in at eight am and he looked at the neat orderly row of good servers, up and running off of cannibalized parts. He then saw the hard drives of the broken servers sitting on a table and my cobbled together computer controlling all of this. I was working on the last viable hard drive when he walked in and looked around.

"Bob, how it the hell have you been able to get this much running? Did you spend all night here?"

"Yeah I did Dale. I was able to save all but three of your servers. Those three got totally fried. I understand that the mainframe was battered but fine. The IBM people got a new case for it and had to change out a couple of the boards, but it is up and running, and has been, except for a little while when they changed the boards and the case. It is running but still offline until we can get some more of the servers physically set up. I think if we can get the equipment you should be running at 95 percent by noon, you will be slow, but running. Now there were the three servers we couldn't save. All their data I hope was backed up before the crash, so anything from the back up until the crash will be gone, but that could be added by hand once we know where the cutoff point is."

"Bob, I am so glad I called you on this. Thank you for all of this, Bob, I trust all this work and ingenuity will be reflected in your invoice for me to pay?"

"Dale you know I charge by the hour, not by the job, when you hire me you get the rest as a bonus. Consider it part of the package. Now, I have a couple more things to get set and then I'm taking an on-the-clock break for about a half hour so your people can clean up this mess a bit and get some equipment in here to replace all this junk laying around."

"Bob why don't you take a longer break and come back after lunch, but first you need some rest. There is a very nice hotel just two blocks from here and I already set you up with a room down there. Go rest, and then come back, this will still be here when you come back. Now that's an order son."

I grinned at Dale and said, "Yes Boss, I'll be back later. Oh yeah, I need a monitor so I can take my laptop back with me."

Dale said something to another guy standing behind him and a flat screen was forthcoming. I hooked it up and grabbed my laptop case and followed Dale out of the room. We shook hands and Dale said, "Thanks again Bob, I really appreciate this, you have no idea how much. Now go get some sleep, the guard downstairs will have you a badge and the hotel address."

 
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