hubris

saturday at work. shit, but made worse by the fact i am in another building in bishopsgate and some telephone engineers are in and they are playing capital gold through thier tinny pc speaker at full blast, so i am having to listen to some absolute shite old peoples music like ELO and the beach boys which i really am not in the mood for.

one other thing i noticed. this building sits on some of the most expensive land in the world right in the heart of the financial district of london. it must be a zillion pounds per square foot, but they have built it at an angle, left a huge atrium space at the front and also the middle is completely empty as well. i would estimate that 40% of the ground area is not used and has no usable office space on it. why wouldn't they buy a plot of land 40% smaller and get the same amount of office space. what a waste of money. it must have cost millions more than it should have. i believe the word i am looking for is hubris, and maybe thats the reason they can't afford to get rid of the nt4 servers kicking around.

UPDATE:
ended up working a 16 hour day because of issues getting some shitty old NT4 servers running and then an issue with a server that boots from the SAN, that we moved to another datacenter. the people that moved it kindly decided to put in some blank hard drives into it so when it got to the other side it was trying to boot off them instead of the SAN. they didn't tell anyone that they had done this on a production server. it was only after someone esle took a look at it today(sunday) and changed the boot order that that we realised it. it would usually skip the RAID controller because it has no disks, and i assumed no one would have put any in because they were not asked to. why would someone randomly put disks into a server?. why???!!!. had me confused and i was convinced along with others that there might have been an issue with it pointing to new LUNs at the new location and maybe there was some issue with the SAN or data.

also to the brain surgeon that decided to do a boot from SAN windows server. i would love to hear the justification for it, seeing as its pretty much the only server in the entire bank set up like this. why?. what was the point of just having one server in the estate set up like this?. its not common anywhere to boot windows boxes from SAN, so why decide to install one here. probably just to add some confusion. the rest of the network is a mess anyways, so why not, eh?. also they presented 11 LUNs of 34GB to it and then spanned it as a single disk using windows. why didn't they just present 340GB spanned across on the SAN side. surely the performance hit is not that bad on a bigger LUN. it just makes for more checking of shit when it goes wrong. this place was run by comedians.

anyways, i learned quite a bit about booting from SAN yesterday. had not seen it anywhere i had worked before. i will also know now not to take anything for granted, between the time a server is switched off and switched on. someone might add some HBA's or put in some disks, or remove some disks, or take out the memory. basically anything can happen. actually come to think of it, i didn't check the processor speed on the CPU, now that the server is back. someone might have replaced them with something else and not told us. jesus wept.
i am not saying they should be killed, but maybe these people should be made to clear land mines in south east asia or maybe they should be made to give up a kidney to someone who really needs one because its wasted on that idiot.

its been a long weekend. quite lucrative though. its sunday afternoon and i need to get home and do my laundry.