Crashes, Drops and OSCON

For years now I have thought that there is a certain set of immutable rules in the universe that specifically govern the circumstances of a network admin's life.

One of them has proven itself over and over. It's a lot like Murphy's Law, but much more specific:

If you're leaving town, all the possible bad things that can happen to your [network | servers | personal computers | other geek devices], will happen in the [days | minutes | hours | seconds] before you leave.

I'm getting ready to go to OSCON next week, and so far my Network Admin's Law is proving itself out yet again. In the past week:

• One of the main circuit breakers in our building overloaded, resulting in a power outage where our generators did not kick in. The actual breaker did not pop, so we didn't know there was a problem. Before we found the problem and reset the breaker, one UPS unit in our NOC ran out of battery power.


• We lost one crappy Windows server data disk as a result of the power outage. Fortunately this was a good test of our backups as we were able to slap new disks in the machine and restore from tape with no data lost. That burnt about 6 hours post power-outage.


• The weekend after the power outage, yet another Windows server decided to lose two disks simultaneously on it's RAID 5 system where all of the server data is stored. 4 more hours burnt restoring that system.


• Prior to the power outage, two other UPS units simultaneously decided that their batteries were bad and needed replacing, further reducing our runtime on batteries during the outage.


• Returning home on the weekend after finishing the #2 restore job above, I sat down to work on the second edition of Wireless Hacks (link to the first edition). Removing my PowerBook from my laptop backpack, it slipped out of my fingers and took a double-header on my nice new wood floor. Result? Nice ding in the floor, and a PowerBook with a display so dim you can barely see it at all.


• Of course, even though AppleCare is a great warranty for PowerBooks, it doesn't cover accidents. It will cost my employer over $1000 to fix the damn laptop. It's a good thing my boss is understanding.


• I figured that my trusty old Dell C600 notebook would have to be my laptop during OSCON while the PowerBook is off getting repaired. However, as soon as I started using it regularly, in Linux or Windows, I found that the trackpad has gone completely loopy. At totally random times the cursor goes nuts - sometimes even if I'm not touching the trackpad at all. I can't tell if it's a pressure issue on the area around the trackpad, or if the pad itself is bad, but there's certainly no time to fix it before I leave.

Fortunately we haven't had any additional network, power or system issues (yet). I'm not looking forward to this weekend, though.

And if you see a depressed guy with little hair in a black t-shirt wandering around OSCON with an old G3 iBook instead of his G4 PowerBook, take pity on me and buy me a beer.

Got a better name for my law? Suggestions welcome.