Summary of the past 1+ month

My life was an interesting one especially over this month on work issue. Well, and as usual, nothing new or news on the personal side of my life.

Before i start, and i would like to give myself more 'life' into this page of my blog (as it had been words and words in the recent entries), i decided to add in one picture of my "future". So there it goes.


Ok, not really that course.. but that uni. As you can see from the bottom left corner of the file in the picture.

As for the past 2 (excluding this) entries, work was fantastically in a disastrous state. Spent 1 month and it is still not resolved. It seemed like also that bad lucks are interested to target me. Since it's a holiday (wow, like finally) tomorrow, so i shall spend a little of time to summarise up the series of unfortunate events.

First of all, on a thursday night and i was doing my routine check on my servers by doing the command "ping " and i couldn't get any responses from all of the servers in the same domain/network.

So, i went to the server room the next day to check it up. Restarted the servers and got it running and then gradually found the main reason why it had failed. But then, the database (aka db) for one of the servers are not working and then it set the worries throughout the whole of the project and her project members.

Well, the problem is i don't know what had i done wrong. But on the other hand, i can't tell my boss that "i don't know" even though i do not really know what happened though i had followed all the procedures on the necessary steps. Reading through the logs were one big tough job as the interface isn't like what u see in Microsoft Word or PDF document. Checking through the internet for resources/solution isn't any easy thing to do as well. Side note: This is how i make friends with google.com. My msn nick says it all.

A lot of suggestions were put forward to solve the problem and one of it (which we are doing it currently) was to copy the db data from one server to the downed server. In the midst of it, we did the tape copying. The bigger tape took around 2 hours as single tape is enough, therefore it's quick. So when the tape has finished copying and was about to load it up into the tape library to the downed server, my boss just realised that the tape library is spoilt! I didn't even realised that until he mentioned it. OK, it's my fault because all these were suppose to be my charge. Ok, so to save time, we tried out another method; using the smaller tape. This required a day's of job as it practically needs attention from the user as this has to change the tape (like a casette). Anyway coz of this, i was running up and down. So when everything was done, brought up to the downed server, then it broke down upon the 2nd tape). So it's like wasted my time and effort over all these.

Saturday was needed to come back for work to as I continue to FTP (aka File Transfer Protocol). As it is our last resort of transferring the data. Taking 2 days to complete but at the least, it's secured. And another 2 days (both on weekends) were eaten up was put to transfer the files to the server. The only positive thing was that I am able to remote in to the office to check on the progress. But my attention for that weekend was on the progress and I didn't go out.

Then during the saturday of the above paragraph, that the building undergo electricity maintenance and as a result my progress put on a hold for 3 hours. Not only that my laptop adaptor was partially spoilt by the sudden surge of power (multiple times).

Then on my office laptop, while i was clearing up unnecessary files, I accidently deleted the system files and i can't load up the windows and it's safe mode windows and i decided to reinstall the windows and that spent my 1 hour 15 mins of time doing on that before bringing it up.

------ OK, a breather for a while -------

I lost my NRIC, Driving licence card and ez-link card in TTSH. But it was not recovered. And I don't even have the time to report about these to the Police on that afternoon, coz of the problem in office. I was only 'given' time by myself near to the end of the day. Went to NPC and made a police report. I showed my NS nric and we chatted a bit on our NSF lives. Ok, so now you know which force i am in for my NS. Ended up it was 11.30 pm when i reached home without have my dinner yet.

The next day (again), my mum received a call from "kidnappers" claiming that i was being kidnapped and needed $80,000 to release me. My mother managed to have $5000 before she was about to meet them when my father happened to call in and he asked my mom to call me to verify and she did. She was then she realised she was almost a victim of a phone scam. Again, police report was made. :(

From that I knew it's impossible to have the 3 cards back. That means i am going to spend maybe $170 on these replacments. With that money, i can get a return tickets to and from bangkok.

So far, my life is on the average among the bad lucks life as it continue to haunt me for 1 month and furthermore.

Well, on the bright side, i have to thank lekmeng, raquel on their presence to boost me, not to forget my colleagues too and rebecca (of which she's an unexpected source) of their prayers and lucks, etc. It's time now i guess to walk out of the darkness and see some light. After all i had been in it for the past 1 month. Hopefully I will be hearing good news from my SAP counterparts later on.

Unlucky weeks (2)

2nd week after the last bad lucks incident, came more bad lucks news for me. Monday and tuesday came out with a lot of work and etc, going home pretty late.

Wednesday was one of the hell day, as i lost my NRIC, Driving licence and an ez-link card. Work was pretty busy that i dun have any time to report loss of these cards to the Police. Now, i hate my job.

Anyway, went to police centre late in the night after i finish work with my father. On thursday, a call was made to my residential line telling my mother that i was kidnapped! According to my mother, the voice and the way i called her was excatly the same. They said that my friend loaned out $80,000 and i am the guarantor for him.

My mother, being a paranoid, plus the way i called her and my voice. She then activated her friend to prepare part of the ransom and was prepared to meet him (them). My father called in at this time then my mother told him the story. My father suggested to call me to verify and indeed, i was safe.

Ok so the story ended by ignoring the the "kidnappers". I don't understand why did my mother has to change her hp line (as the hp number was given to them), like why she has to be afraid of them? They should be the one who is afraid of us.

Anyway, my course of actions are to submit my ezlink card number to the Police. I firmly believe that they would used my ez-link card. So from there, they could trace the whereabouts with SMRT and Sbs Transit. If they enter MRT station, that would be even better as CCTV can get a pictoral face of them making the police (and me) to trace this person even easier!

A couple of questions came into my head.

How do the fuck they know the way i called my mother and where do they get my voice from?

How do the fuck they know that my mother would be the one who will pick up the phone, and not other person else?

I am going to get the bottom of this. I will work with the Investigating Officer on monday.

Most importantly, I think i am getting this correct. Pardon me with superstitious, as I had no ways to solve my bad luck. I went for a haircut and i told the hair dresser serving me to cut it as short as possible.

YES! No more bad luck so far. =)

Unlucky weeks

Quote of this entry: What doesn't you kill you, makes you stronger.

Been down with unbelievable bad lucks since last friday. An unbelievable week for me which had made me so lousy. It all happened like this.

On thursday evening last week, I did a "ping" command onto my servers to make sure that they are alive as part of my routine check. However, all the servers didn't reply to me and i was pretty worried that the server might be down.

So, on friday, i drew out the key and went in. Checked that the servers were actually up and working. But, i still couldn't interact with them digitally.

So, i initiated a shutdown on all the servers. Bad things happen when the Service of one of the servers can't startup.

Informed my colleagues and after trying for a couple of hours, we can't do anything. Then we all informed my boss over this.

From there, hell starts to break loose and bad lucks were seem to be targetting at me.

1. My colleague and I went down to Basement (where one of the many servers we had are located) and it's a long way, so i had been running here and there a lot of times each day for the past week. We spent time until 9.30 pm in there before we left our workplace.
   
   
2. Boss came and suggested that to transferred these files to the downed server. So we spent 1 hour down there trying to mount the files directly to the unix machine. After trying that much, i'm unable to do so. Then i was thinking to copy the files were copied to windows and from there, to transfer to the USB external HD. From that idea, we had to stay back and configure the necessary setting before we all left the place. It was pretty early then. 7 pm
   
   
3. In order to have more backup coverage, we decided to have more backups with different medium. 4mm tape and a bigger tape. Did that and stayed back. Forget the timing though.
   
   
4. Done with the backup tapes the next day, wanted to recover and my boss just discover that the tape library (for the bigger tape) hardware fail! Gosh. Coz i didn't realise that it has stopped. Reprimanded me a bit.
   
   
5. My boss then thought of other idea. To bring a laptop and the external HD in to send the files in as there's an Gigabit Ethernet switch in it, therefore transferring of files would be quick. But, he forgot that the device is down and thus that idea was dropped. Again, the recovering of server is delayed.
   
   
6. Decided to do the slow method by ftp the files. And meanwhile, writing of data from the 4mm tape had began and i was hoping to change to the 2nd tape on that night as well. Didn't realise that it gotta be so long and i spent the whole night on friday in the office till sat 1.30 am without changing the tape. (Thanks lm and raquel who were there waiting for me till even so late)
   
   
7. Saturday. Came back to the office. Saw the message by the system informing me to change tape. and so i changed, but to my bad luck again, the system said that there's checksum error, and was unable to proceed to writing the data to the system. Damn it. To add to the problem, i was only informed at the last minute that there was an 3 hours power shutdown-cum-maintenance which of course i couldn't do anything else!
   
   
8. I realised that, at the end of the day, it might be the fault of the patch panel which linked to our office might have spoilt which was why it was unable to communicate well. Had i discovered that earlier, the above mentioned 7 points wouldn't occur.
   
   
9. For now, the good thing is that the ftp program that i used doesn't hanged the files on me though it would disconnect from the server after long period of inactivity.

Now i hope, that there would be no more bad luck anymore for tomorrow as we are going to restore the system. Everyone please pray for me.

Nonethess, from these past 8+ days, i realised what i was missing in relation to my work performances. Thanks rebecca for chatting with me throughout the whole night when i was in the office.