Ah, today was going to be my Day Off. I was going to sleep in til I couldn’t stand it anymore, then eat my strawberry donuts and play City of Heroes. Oh ye evil lightning blasts of the weekend!

Around 8:30am, I got a call from the treasurer at work. No one could logon. So I sat up, slipped on some clothes & a hat (my hair must be washed every morning) and rode my bike to work. I figured all I’d have to do was turn on some servers that didn’t restart or reboot one that got confused.

I did the rounds and most of the servers were doing quite nicely. The PDC (Primary Domain Controller), fileserver and web caching server all were uninterrupted thanks to the UPS they are hooked to. The elementary server showed up fine on the server list. But the two servers in the media center were not showing up on the list. They were both on, but Blackknight wasn’t responding and the HSBDC (High School Backup Domain Controller) needed logged in. HSBDC is our DHCP server (sorry for all the geek talk – those of you who know what I’m talking about can start to see why things weren’t necessarily working well). And when I checked on the DHCP service, it wasn’t running. And I couldn’t start it. DHCP is what sends addresses to our computers so that they can log onto the network. So with it down, people couldn’t log on. Blech.

Well, I didn’t know how to fix that DHCP service since it was running on Linux, but I can set up a WinNT4 box with DHCP, surely… Well, I had done it before. So I decided to stick it on the PDC. This is all temporary anyhoo since this summer the school is getting a new tech and Win2003 server network. I figured the PDC could handle being DHCP until then. But stuff still wasn’t working even when I had it set up. A few phone calls to other techs (the county & MDECA) and it was 3 hours of me at work. I was very hungry and very stinky. I needed to have breakfast & bath & wash my hair. So I rode my bike back and did just that. (Mmmm, strawberry donuts!)

Well, thanks to the calls, when I had returned, I had an idea of what to do. I changed a few settings on the new DHCP service and then released & renewed addresses for any machine that I knew had been on that day. (For a school that’s out, there sure were a lot of folks in the building!) It was another hour and a half of work to finish all of this. But it looks like folks were able to do everything they needed to do. Yay!

Tomorrow is the first of two summer training sessions on ProgressBook, our new grading program. It’s the one I signed up for, so no day off for me tomorrow. I’m hoping that Wednesday will be my Day Off. The donuts will be rather dry by then, however…