Phew. It’s been a tough old day, it has. Firstly, I got in at work this morning to find that the Exchange server was down. the disk had run out of space (this happens from time to time, as Exchange tends to generate fairly copious transaction logs). Anyway, it turns out that the logs were being written something like every five minutes. The mail server had been down the whole weekend, I think possibly because I accidentally left open relay enabled on our SMTP server (doh!). For those of you who don’t know what that means, basically any old spammer could use our server to send junk e-mail. Not good. The server had a huge load of about 15,000 emails to get through! It could take a while to sort that one out (it wasn’t exactly going through them at a rate of knots when I left work this evening…)
Then, one of my colleagues had a problem connecting to Oracle from Java. Now, I have to say, the Oracle OCI driver is the work of the Devil himself. If the Oracle JDBC drivers and the version of the .dlls in the Oracle Home don’t match EXACTLY — you’re screwed. I’ve had so many problems with it recently, it’s unbelievable. I think my colleague spent the entire day trying to get one flippin’ thing to work! Grrr.
On the positive side… the internet at home hasn’t been working since last Thursday. (No, that’s not the positive side, the positive bit is coming…) I couldn’t figure out why, so I raised a support call. Nothing much was happening with that, so on a whim I decided to see if I could ping our server at work (I needed the IP address today so I was just about able to remember it). It went through OK! Which was good, because it proved to me that it was just DNS that wasn’t working… I was able to SSH on to work, grab the IP addresses of a DNS server, and “BAM!” (as Elzar might say) — I was rolling.
Aaaaanyway. Sorry for the rather techy note of this post, I just had to get that lot off my chest! Fortunately, getting the internet back has put me in a good mood 🙂
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