Apr 16, 2006 | blog
Ok, we’ve completed DR, and it was an overall success. Though our provider had several hardware issues that delayed our start time, and impeded our early progress, we did complete our required tests.
One stretch objective was “bagged” at the end, though we did restore the systems involved. This was due to the length of the test, we had added 8 hours to the test when the provider offered them for not being 100% ready at the beginning. That change did make for a longer than anticipated work schedule for a number of the staff – several extra hours were spent on-site rather than getting much needed rest.
Once we completed yesterday, we all headed home for rest; I got home in the afternoon, ate a little, watched a movie and tried to waste a little time to get closer to a “real” bedtime. Finaly crashed around 9pm and slept for a little over 12 hours. Good thing we don’t do this too often, its hard to catch up on rest.
Now we’ll gather our notes, archive the contents of the DR Blog and bring all this information to our post-DR de-brief meeting sometime in the next week. Lots of items will be discussed, from our performance, our providers performance, what went well, what we can improve on, and so on.
Until next time!
Apr 14, 2006 | blog
After a few hours it sure does get boring. We’re on track to finish up tomorrow afternoon sometime, and I know everyone is looking forward to concluding the test.
There are not many ammenities at the test facility we are at, our remote team probably is at the nicer site. However, they are carrying the “heavy load” so to speak. They are putting in longer hours and doing most of the restore work. Our team here in town is focused more on supporting and coordinating the system testers that validate that the restore is completed successfully.
Well, I’m going to get a chance for some extra rest this evening, and will be surfing on my favorite news sites to see what is new out in IT land. Soon, it’ll be back to normal and I can’t wait for that.
Apr 14, 2006 | blog
We got in around 9am this morning and found there were several issues from the night team. It’ll make for a long day for the other side of the house, but they usually are able to get around hardware handicaps.
We’ll hopefully be testing several restored systems by late morning or early afternoon, but we have until tomorrow morning to finish up. With only about 4 hrs of sleep for the team, they’re doing well.
Its unfortunate that there are so many hardware issues in this test, the vendor is working with us to figure out what is wrong. The last two tests we’ve run have had flawless hardware execution, everything was configured correctly and ready to go. This is the first test in a year that has had HW issues, and not small ones either.
Oh, well, 23hrs to go. 🙂
Apr 14, 2006 | blog
I know its early, early Friday, but we’re still on “Thursday” night…
Ok, its been a long day, and we’re getting ready to head out for today. But we’ll be back tomorrow at 9am to continue!
Things are looking good, we’ve restored a client PC with the full corp. image. Exchange was successfully restored (but needs to be tested), and the VPN systems are on their way back as well. The Unix systems are also on their way back up and will be ready for testing sometime tomorrow morning.
All in all, good bunch of work so far. Thanks, to everyone for all the work!
Apr 13, 2006 | blog
Today has been an example of things that can go wrong. While I was back at the office for a few hours getting my comptuer reimaged, our tape backup library was being ‘obstinate’ to be kind. So we’re about 3.5hrs behind schedule, but knowing our team, we’ll make some of that time up – we all have a few tricks up our sleeve!
My computer is back up and running, and I’m going to follow what I did for my home system. A clean minimalistic system that only has the software that I really need to get the job done. Not sure what caused the issues I saw earlier, but I’ve dumped the previous build and started from scratch.
Now to wait for the data to be restored.
Apr 13, 2006 | blog
I was connected via VPN to the office when it blue screened. I’m back to the office to correct the issue and prevent it from happening again.
Something with the personal firewall I believe. Time to re-image and get back to work!
