BennyEast.Com/Blog The official blog of Kenny West

I’m calling for Backup! No don’t backup.

Every time there's a backup problem, I think of this commercial.

Anyways so right now I'm watching this one mail server backup... It's chugging along.  Last night when I was logged in checking on a few things...

(remember that my boss is out for the week, so I'm covering some of his usual known duties)

I noticed that one of the mail servers was stuck on the backup.  It's one of those deals where the service was hanging, which means you try to cancel it, it won't cancel.  But it's also never going to finish.

So, you have to manually kill and restart the services.

It's not terrible.  It's just that the backup program we use doesn't really fail gracefully.

For whatever reason computer programs fail.  It happens.  Anyways, sometimes they are very micro level things, such as little tiny services running.  Sometimes though they don't fail and restart (this is what I mean by failing gracefully).  They just hang.  Who knows what is actually going on.  It's a server running exchange and the program we use is a commercial backup program from a popular vendor.  It's running on MS windows server and it's running bare metal on a Dell server.  We have a few of these servers in racks.

We may eventually push some or all of our email stuff to cloud services like G Suite from Google, but for now we host it all in-house.

Anyways, so... earlier today I had to basically run the steps to kill a backup that had been stuck in this limbo state.  The next scheduled backup began and it's running now.  All looks good.

Today was another busy day.  But you know, busy makes the day go quick.  So it's actually not bad.  We'll see if tomorrow is equally as busy.  It's interesting because this whole deal where it's just my coworker and myself is kind of motivating us to work a little harder than we usually do.  I guess ideally when the boss comes back... We should continue this motivation... Let's hope so!

Today we were brainstorming all these projects that we've been wanting to tackle but have had on the back burner.  Just systems that we need to revamp or whatever.  One of them we actually purchased a license for but haven't implemented it yet.  So, we're going to work on that because it's a wasted license right now! And that's no good.  Buying something, and then not putting it into production is a big old waste of resources.

The idea is that you add value to your system or efficiency or whatever by purchasing something.  Or it's just a waste of the organizations valuable resources/money.

Anyways, I was going to stay up until this backup finished but I'll just check it in the morning.

I have to get up a tad bit early to take a check to the bank to pay property taxes for the house.  My hope is that the township is as mindful about being efficient with the money that I pay out in taxes as we try to be at work with the money that we take in from tuition and such.  Anyways so hopefully the backup finishes a-okay and everything just like the problem that is solved in the commercial with the roaming gnome.