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11/12/2003 Entry: "Babysitting YAPO" When we were in this lab at work, I'll call "The Upstairs Lab," we had some problems like cooling, minor theft, and some meddling. Once in a while, the network they put us on would be rank with virus and trojan traffic. So they moved us to an "official production room," which we'll call the "Computer Room," over a year ago. Part of the agreement to move downstairs was that not only was it far more secure, it was a production environment, and everything was stable. They lied. Today I have to baby-sit "YAPO," Yet Another Planned Outage, which we almost never had in the "Upstairs Lab." In this new area, we have had network outages, power outages, and equipment failures at a far greater level than before. Many of the "planned outages" are over the weekend, and I have had to baby-sit most of them. At least today's YAPO is during my normal morning work hours, and doesn't involve a section with servers (we hope, that's what they told us, only two of our rows are affected by this maintenance). Baby-sitting involves: - Gracefully shutting down all systems on the netowrk/power grid affected - Waiting to see when the workers actually shut the network/power off - Keeping an eye on their work, making sure the Doozers build more crystal lattice - When they give me the "all clear," I power everything back up, make sure it's okay - I write a report on what happened, and what excuses they gave for being late Some "production" system.