nemolit

        It’s been a week since the problem. I’m back on standby tomorrow morning from 09:00am.         I’ve delved into the logs from the system and could not find a single errant instruction that could cause the problem we experienced last week. The system just decided to kill itself, it seems. This causes me more problems. Now I need to pinch out time from such a tight schedule to fault find the whole environment. Everyone is running off with the major Treasury application installation that’s on the 4th of March. Our manager is busy with the move of our data center from one provider to another and we are moving hardware from one storage array to another.         Problems will abound. There just isn’t time to look at everything. Nothing is tested. But, management is happy. They just need someone else to point the finger at.

        It’s been one of those days - again!         It’s feeling a lot like ground hog day.         A strange problem, corrupted our production AIX server        and we are restoring the OS from a mksysb (just the AIX naming for the root disk backup). I am hoping that the recovery will restore all the security information, which we were able to save from the old system. What exactly went wrong on it is still to be determined. Right now, it’s all hands on deck to get the system back.         Plans were made to switch to the DR (Disaster Recovery) site but we are not sure that the other systems will be able to continue operating on this side of the great divide, while the core system is sitting in the DR computer room.         First signs that things were not normal? There were none. A customer support agent came storming in waving arms wildly about his head, babbling about transactions not going through. When I investigated I found that I could not login (switch user) to the applicatio

        It’s Saturday night. Around 07:00pm the power went out. There was these ominous sounds that accompanied it. At first we thought that it was just he local sub-station that had been overloaded again. Politicians and their promises of free electricity to the poor masses has a tendency to over extend infrastructure, so we have gotten used to this. But, after a few minutes of the unnatural silence, we could here the deep basso resonance of the diesel generators at the platinum refinery a couple of minutes from our house. This immediately dispelled the notion that it was a local power outage. You see, the refinery is powered directly from the national power grid and doesn’t rely on the local government infrastructure. As such, the power should be restored quickly as well, if the power distribution lines to this area had not been damaged.         About six months ago another power outage occurred whilst I was at work. This one affected the Sandton business district. It’s main cause wa

It’s amazing how much you see, but don’t see. You know what I mean. You notice something different. Be it in your house, at the office, with a friend, the kids or around town. You file it away for later reference and investigation, because invariably, at the time you notice it you are too busy rushing between the events in your life. Today is one of those days that follows after one of those days where you noticed something, which got filed for later investigation - for me, it’s the appearance of a wine cooler in the house. I noticed the little rectangular box with the blue light display some weeks ago. Filed it in the ‘to find out what it is, whose it is and why it’s here’ file and summarily forgot about it. Till a few minutes ago when I wanted to open some red wine. I buy wine from a merchant and have developed a taste for certain makers wines. An appreciation of the fine art that is wine making and the incredible bliss of paring good wine, with good food and great conversation. I wa

Business must employ people and not expect them to work! It’s been a while, and I really thought I’d endure beyond it, but I just couldn’t. The recent bomb that was dropped on South African society and its co-committal response from government just could not be ignored. Let me clear a few things up from the start. I am an employee. I am also a business owner. I’m in business because I saw a way to do something better than what was being done and provide a service. To this end I started a company. As my reputation spread I got more work to do. The more work I did the more work I got and so the snow ball rolled and my company revenues grew. To maintain these good vibes and continue making a profit, I started hiring people to do some of the tasks, to the point where I am now mainly focussed on keeping the business in the clear waters of profitability and continued growth. But, to be able to do this, I need the people I hired to do their jobs. To do their jobs and become more efficient at

It's been months since I posted anything to this blog. Amazing to think that something I felt so pationate about, could peter out in a matter of two months. Yes. Sixty days, and I've all but forgotten about this blog. Well, let me correct this omission on my part and get you all caught up. Since my last post I've completed the RAC/Grid Accelerated training with Oracle. Have not worked a lick on it here in the office - thank goodness we have another DBA that got all of that sorted out on what is to become the production hardware. But, we've had a few more surprises. We need to move our disaster recovery site - cost escalations made our existing provider prohibitively expensive. Also, we are moving from our SAN provider. Throwing out the DS8100 and installing shiny new EMC VNX disk arrays. Proof of concept was done over the christmas period. I've completed most of the work on running this banking application on a high-availability cluster. Still need to write up t