I’m a Lotus Notes developer at a company that works in the second mortgage industry. We handle things like title work, appraisals, closings (HUD’s) and other various documents that go along with getting a second mortgage. My job along with my two colleagues is to assist in moving the business from using faxes and snail mail to using the Internet. Needless to say we have a fair sized server room to handle our internal data and the two web portals that we run. Keeping these up and running is not my primary responsibility unless I’m the only one around.

So, the Vice President, who happens to also be the CTO and son of the owner, is out of town this week at some CEO conference. And my boss, the director of the IT dept. is in North Carolina with his family celebrating Rosh Hashanah.

I knew back on Friday that having them both out of town at the same time did not bode well and so far I have been proved correct. Yesterday morning (a Monday) I came in to find our SCO Unix back end application would not allow anyone to login; so off go the frantic calls and emails to the consultant that handles that application. Then I went back to the server room to change out one of the backup tapes. As I approached the door I could hear an insistent beeping going on inside. My first thought was the primary AC unit, which has been giving us problems, has failed and I’m going to find the servers cooking themselves. I was close, in that the alarm was from the AC unit, but thankfully it was only a warning about the humidity in the room. The temperature felt fine, but still, off goes the call to the HVAC company to get a tech out here and check the unit. At this point I’m joking with our VP of Sales saying that the only thing left to go down was our Right Fax server.

When I left last night at 5:00 I told the young guy who takes care of the desktops and printers not to let the Right Fax server crash.

When I got in this morning at 6:30 I was told that the Right Fax server stopped working 5 minutes after I walked out the door. ARGH!! I go into my office and boot up my laptop to check on the server statuses and find that one of the web portal servers is not responding. Off I run down the hall to the server room only to find that this server is so locked up that it won’t even respond being shut down, so, I had to do the unthinkable and cold boot the machine.

Not sure what will happen next, but it’s still early.