A Submarine Mechanic
Have you ever watched the movie Das Boot? That is one of my all time favorite movies. It’s about a German U-Boat during WWII, and is just a really good movie, though tragic.
In the boat, there is a bedraggled submarine engineer meant to keep the boat working. The boat gets beat up with depth charges, you see him with a piece of wood and a wrench beating things back into place.
That’s what I felt like the past two days. Over the weekend, the A/C went out in my core room, got at least 125 degrees in there (due to some sensors that do an emergency shutdown at that temperature), and cooked a lot of stuff. I’ve spent two long, but successful, days at beating my engine room back into working order for the most part. All in all, only lost one piece of equipment, and a few camera’s due to power spikes caused by the heat. The camera’s, not much I can do about them, since we’re due to start retrofitting the system in the next month.
I did see the fastest shipment ever of a part though. One of my 3550 switches blew out the two GBIC fiber ports, and after troubleshooting that issue for a good hour, ordered a new one through the company in D.C. I got the switch in 2 hours, though it took another 4 hours in configuring it to get online and working (I’m a bit rusty in Cisco, or it would have only taken 2 or 3)
Either way, Monday morning, opening the door to what felt like hell, I felt like that U-Boat engineer. We just took a bunch of hits, we’re taking on water (or, in this case, having absolutely no water pass through the cooling system), I have 30 pieces of equipment screaming at me with hi temp alarms, and it’s Wednesday morning, and I got the last piece of equipment back online. We’re hobbling back to coast now.
I’m tired, but it was fun. I finally have some coffee now too :)
