I’m not sure but I think I’ve got to go get the duck back from Tim.
I say I’m not sure because I’m not sure, even by my own rules of my own game whether taking a system down at midnight and getting it back up by 5am, before the users come in, counts.Â
Our usually criteria for a duck is that it has to affect at least 10 people, 10 being an arbitrary number that I pulled out of my backside.
This was a major system, with many, many users, but since none of them noticed (other than the people I notified of the problem) I personally am not sure it should count.
Can we get a ruling on this?
More information. In the process of doing a data migration on one of our development systems (mind you, we’re at peak development cycle right now, so that’s a busy system) one of the requests was that I resize the C: drive on this system from 12G to something more useful, like the 36G that is the physical drive. The problem that has kept me from doing it is that someone had put application data in the latter partition of the drive.
So after (from home, over Remote Desktop) moving the Application, SQL Data, SQL logs, and such to the Symmetrix, I wiped the left-over partitions and resized the C: drive using a tool called “Acronis Disk-Director”.  Unfortunately this was bought before I had any input into purchasing of software like this, because I’m a PowerQuest guy myself. 🙂
So at about 12:30am I resize the drive and the system locks up cold. Won’t respond to a ping, nothing. This didn’t make me happy because I live about an hour’s drive from work and having to haul my tired butt in at this hour is just not attractive.
I get into the office about 2:30 (after the usual puttering around that involves getting ready to leave on short notice) and realize that I left my badge on my dresser at home. No other way into the building, let alone the datacenter, so I haul my tail all the way back home to get my badge. It’s a good thing though, because I found I had both keys to my wife’s car in my pocket and it would have totally thrown off her day if she couldn’t get the kids to school. (side story)
So I get back in around 4:30am, get into the datacenter, and find the system sitting at a “Delayed Write failed” message.  I power it off and power it back on to find it *thankfully* boots. However I have two different partition sizes being reported, which usually means that there is a corruption in the FAT table.
Acronis showed the size as being 33GB, Windows still showed it at 12G. What I ended up doing is actually having to resize the 33G partition to 30G, reboot, then resize it back to 33G to get all of the various tables in sync.
Seemed to fix the problem, like I said, before 5am.
So tell me, is it duck-worthy? Or just another example of how Microsoft conspires to keep us all grumpy and sleepless.
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Hrmm, well this one boils down to the spirit of the duck. Is it handed out for “wow I f-ed that one up” or is it handed out for “wow, this isn’t going to end well” (IE: pissed off end users). Perhaps both are a bit more philosophical than the duck was ever meant to be :>
I would say its duck-worthy.
Reason being, it will keep you on your toes. You dont want to get sloppy thinking “ah well its early in the morning so I dont need to be so careful as nobody will notice”. I say give it out for things like what you just did and it keeps everyone on their toes.
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The spirit of the duck. I guess the duck exists to remind us of our humanity. We’re all human, we all make mistakes once in a while.
I will take the duck back and will display him with pride. 🙂
Well then, you are most definitely deserving of the duck. If not for the downed server (which technically was not a duck) then for forgetting your card and your wife’s keys 🙂
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Touche – The funny part was, when i got home, about 3:30am, I had to go into the bedroom to get my badge. My wife, who is a very light sleeper, woke up understandably annoyed, (the baby had kept her up until about 2am anyway) and my response to her was a simple, “I don’t want to talk about it…” As I grabbed my badge and left. 🙂
Ahhh, light sleepers are fun. I can’t recall how many times I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night to be informed the dogs are “making noise”.
“No honey, you’re making noise, the dogs were just chewing on their bones.” WOMEN!! 🙂
Wow, I think your blog is messed up sir. That last message I left took ~36 hours to actually post from the time I submitted it!
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Nah – you got flagged as a spammer. Is there something you want to tell us? LOL
No, your filter just realized geeks like us should not be talking about women.
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