One of the things that annoys me about my job is when I have to do work
on a server at a remote location. The problem is most of these
remote locations are either in the office of the on-site technical
support person or in some undesirable location. The upgrade I had
to do today was firmly in the latter: it was located in a closet in the
basement of the Plant Sciences building here on campus.
Well, the upgrade should not have taken much more than two hours at the
most, but I had scheduled for four hours. Most of that time was
trying to get the CD-ROM drive to work in NetWare. For some
reason, everything I did could not get it to work. After reaching
my wit’s end, I decided to call Novell Technical Support. I
explain the problem, and the engineer I get on the other end mentions
another way to perform the upgrade. I follow those steps, and the
upgrade goes smoothly. The total time to completion: 5.5 hours,
including the time I spent getting things squared away in my
office. The server needs to be restarted later tonight, but once
that is done all should be well.
To quote the late Hannibal from the A-Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
