I came into work on Friday morning to find out that our Microsoft Sharepoint based Intranet was not working. After restarting the server a few times and looking at the system log I found that it was not able to authenticate users, which got me looking at our Primary Active Directory Server.
After trying to log into it without success I got up off my lazy but and took a walk to the server room where I heard the tell tail "click, click, click, click" of a failed hard drive. This server is our primary domain controller and it was dead. There is a backup / fall over domain controller sitting next to it, but for some reason that I have not yet discovered, it has not taken on the jobs of our primary system.
What really got to me though was our lack of planning when setting up this server. We did not RAID the Operating System! So now I am having to rebuild the server from scratch, which I have never done before. This is going to be a long week...
I order two replacement hard drives on Friday which arrived this morning. In rebuilding this server I am going to be setting it up with a software RAID configuration. Windows Server 2003 makes this super easy to do and here is a link to a good tutorial about how to do it:
I'll be reviewing all my servers and doing this on any ones that don't already have mirrored hard drives. With the cost of hard drives today it stupid not to.
Comments
I'm on my way out, but.....
still trying to get a grip on the culture of YWAM. (Disclaimer: I am only really involved in european Office, got insight on another base, and hear a lot of things around. So the following is only my side of the story)
But back to the culture. You ask: "Why didn't we plan?" I ask you: Do we ever plan? Do is that something we have been denying in our roots (Our roots are strongly pentecostal who have sometimes (had) the tendency to have faith than to plan.
The way I see our Dutch bases operate, makes me wonder about the culture. We Dutchies are worldwide known for our control and planning. Beside that we have a strong "management"leadership according to a lot of people.
But still we buy all kinds of stuff without knowing if we need it, can use it, and what for. That includes in the last month: MP3 player, Copy Machine, 14 New Desktops.
So again: You found it out the hard way by loosing your Primary controller. Maybe should other people also have a strong sitback, and really think: Oko, wat do we do, when we get intruded by HAckers? Or are we safe from fire?
I'm glad Bill you spend a couple of euros more on it, just to be safe. Maybe that has also been in our roots. We stepped into really old cars, and trusted God. But now we "have the money", how do we spend it?