Putting Out Fire
Fire is bad.
It's been awhile since I had to "put out the fire", or been involved in a team effort of putting out fire. Before my current work at this place doing enterprise software GUI, putting out fires were common lingo in my other work environments.
This morning at 10:20 I had to rush into work on my normal WFHW (Work From Home Wednesdays). It turned out our web server was down and the worst of it...the CEO found THAT out. Bad...bad...bad. And on top of that the one IT person who configured the web server and knew it's complicated folder structure left last week to work for another start-up. Essentially the three of us who had to put out the fire were madly scrambling trying to figure out what happened.
I'm the web guy. John from IT. Danny...I'm not sure what Danny does but he has all the passwords and all these consoles on his cool machine all ready to go. Unfortunately we were the blinds leading the blinds. My other GUI-web guy was nowhere to be found through multiple trying of IM-ing and calling him via his cell.
Anyway long story short we did a temporary hacked job and it is now working although we contacted the ex-IT guy to help us look into it. The fire slowly dims as I'm writing this in the hopes that ex-IT guy will figure it out.
You know what? I actually enjoy putting out fire. I miss it. I know I know you can only put out so much fire and if there are enough of these...well who wants to work for a company that is always in crisis mode. But secretly, I kind of enjoy it. The running around, everyone is just talking back and forth, the barriers of nicety comes down...things happen.
Actually you are probably saying it's not that bad. At least his got time to blog about it. And you are right. Just wanted to say that I miss the adrenaline rush of the maddening crowd of the crazy world wide web startups. Haha.
I'll end it with a hilarious email WE got at work yesterday regarding one of our servers.
from: Danny Leung
to: Engineering distribution list
Earth was having OS problem this morning. Some client machines may have seen this error: yp_all: clnt_call: RPC: Timed out Problem went away after earth was rebooted.
-Danny
I wonder if Earth crashed had something to do with it?
In case you weren't clear, anything I say on this blog is my own opinion and not that of my employer, or anyone else for that matter. It's just me.
