Server Saga

Here's the "complete" story of the problems with the library server, as it has happened so far, from my perspective.

Monday, March 28: Not able to connect to the server when we open the library. Contact tech. They spend the day working on the problem. Determine that it is a hardware problem that they are not able to fix themselves. I'm counting my blessings that this has happened at the beginning of spring break--should be plenty of time to get it back up before students return and place demands on the system again.

Tuesday, March 29: Tech contacts the company that supports the server hardware. Finds out that our hardware is no longer under warranty. The hardware company will call someone to come out and fix it for a few thousand dollars. As a new director of technology is starting for the college on Wednesday, the decision makers decide to ask the new director to assume the problem when he starts the next day.

Wednesday, March 30: The new director starts. Has a variety of meetings through the day. Was expected to be briefed on the library server during an early afternoon meeting.

Thursday, March 31: The tech director for HSLDA and the new director work together in the morning to call the hardware company and ask for someone to come out.

Friday, April 1: Someone's coming out to work on the server. April Fools! Tech spent the day waiting and making calls trying to get someone out to fix the hardware, as promised.

Saturday, April 2: The hardware tech finally made it out in the afternoon and replaced the hard drive. The software support isn't available over the weekend, so they'll be contacted to work on getting the system back up on Monday morning.

Sunday, April 3: Day of rest.

Monday, April 4: Students have returned from spring break.
Morning report: The system should be operational around 12:00 or 1:00. Of the server's two hard drives, only the drive with the system software crashed. The data drive is intact. As soon as the software is re-installed, we'll be back in business.
Afternoon report: There have been problems with getting the right version of the software installed.
Last report of the day at 6:30: Very close to getting the system back up. Should be up in the next couple of hours. I asked that the circulation desk be notified as soon as the system was operational.

Tuesday, April 5: Still can't connect to the server.
Morning Report: New director comes down to give me the bad news. They were still working on the server problem when the college experienced a power outage at 8:30PM. The server's data drive was corrupted. The tape back-up of the data is being checked. If the data on the back-up is good, the data drive will be reformatted and they'll restore from the back-up. The hopefully-worst-case scenario is the data drive won't reformat and the hardware tech has to be called again to replace that drive. And, oh BTW, who should the director contact to get specs in case we need a new server?
Noon Report: The data drive has been successfully reformatted. They will be able to restore from a back-up tape labeled "Friday 3/25." After some reasoning and debate, they decided that means the tape was placed in the drive on Friday evening and holds the back-up that ran on Saturday at 3:00AM. Since the library was not open on Saturday (spring break), we shouldn't lose any circulation records (check-outs or check-ins). We should only lose the cataloging that I did over the weekend. And that's good news, since circulation records are essentially impossible to recreate, but I held the cart of books I had cataloged, so that can be re-done.
Last report of the day at 6:30: Data on the server has been accessible since about 4:30, but no changes can be made. Software support found errors in the database tables after the restore and are trying to fix the problems. We are promised access by morning.

To be continued...