I realized I rarely blog about work anymore. This isn't some great plot. It's just that I like my job. Rarely is there anything bad to whine about, nor anything fantastic to gloat about.

Today however has been frustrating. We've had backup issues the last couple of nights. Jobs start but don't finish. That sort of thing. Well they finish, bptm hands the job back, but bpsched never says "Ooh that's done, NEXT!" This has lead to ugly ugly backup reports in the morning.

So I called tech support late last night, and got a call back at 7:30 this morning. The things the Symantec/Veritas tech was telling me seemed almost like tier 1 voodoo fixes. But I tried them. And they appear to be working. Only tonight will tell I guess. So it'll be another long sleepless night with nobody on IM to chat with, while I watch my backups churn.

Added to this, is the EXTRA SPECIAL NIFTY full backup of our test ERP box, which isn't really a text box so much as it's auxiliary production. It has to be wiped and rebuilt for reasons that the Unix/ERP side of the house folks know. I know it has to do with "the software is too old for the new hardware" sorts of things. Well since they're wiping it they of course want copies of the data. Even the data that should be fine. I've heard things about tonight's activities like "We don't care if all the other backups fail. This has to run as fast as possible." "I don't care if we cancel everything else, this has to be fast." "Doing this fast is the most important part. Because nobody else can start until you're done." I just keep nodding sagely and discussing that with one network cable there is only so fast I can move 400GB of data. I initially estimated a best case of 10 hours. I'm hoping to beat that, but we'll see.

I don't really know what they want me to do, Sure I have 4 drives that can all spin at 36MB/sec in theory, and in reality sometimes get as high as 32MB/sec. But I don't have the inbound bandwidth to really spin them all that fast. After all the best I can do inbound is the 125MB/sec of Ethernet. By the time you strip out TCP and IP headers and other junk, we're down quite a bit from there in useful data. Add to this conundrum that we're coming of one server, and 9 spindles and we just have to admit that there is a finite max speed, and life is going to have to go on.

I guess we'll see. I'll bet I don't sleep much tonight.