The day started badly, while travelling to an other office I was held up in traffic at 7:15 AM on a Sunday morning! Could the day get any worse, well of course it could, the plan was simple replace two switches on the SAN. Well we managed to snatch total defeat from the jaws of victory without even trying, the servers were all shutdown OK, the replacement fiber was in position, the documentation had been followed to the letter. All we had to do was move the dark fiber to the new switches and zone in the servers, at this point we discovered tha the Blu-Tack fairies had been and done some work without us knowing. They had sneaked in overnight, spliced the wrong ends on the cable and then fitted them together with Blu-Tack in the best traditions of SAN engineering. If you would like some proof, then take a look at the picture. This is the circuit that all our disk replication uses, the disks at each end are in a fully configured EVA 5000.
While we were checking the routing of the cable we could have screwed this up, the cable has been joined like this for a number of years. I personally thing that the Blu-Tack would have held the finger print of the offending individual for this length of time. It’s obvious that the person who installed this setup is a genius when it comes to fiber attached storage, it’s also obvious that they have little or no professional pride in their work as there is no need to leave a job patched up like this for a number of years.
Still nothing like this will happen in the new building that we move into tomorrow, as all will be controlled by someone who has a more significant set of cognative abilities than a paper weight. There is also some vague chance that they will be more capable than the average building brick, of course there is always a chance that I will be completely off the mark and that things could get worse.
But that is a chance that we will have to take, until then we have to expect to have regular visits from the Blu-Tack Fairies!