\jeff{krimmel}

Congratulations and the File Server

Heather passed her candidacy exam today. Congratulations Heather! The first official Ph.D. candidate amongst our ranks. A job very well done.

I was picking up some paperwork from the office on the second floor of Thomas (the mechanical engineering building on campus) today, and I walked past Vaughan on my way out. Vaughan is in my CFD class and is also a user of the computational cluster I maintain that is now down for the second time this term*. Vaughan asks how I’m doing, and I give him the standard response, “Oh, I’m doing okay. How are you?” Vaughan replies, “Well, I must be doing better than you. Every time I hear your name it’s next to a four letter word.” Ha! That was priceless. It’s just one of those situations where you are expecting to have a completely generic, run-of-the-mill conversation, and you’re hit with something unexpected. Good job, Vaughan. Way to keep me on my toes.

* Note: This time the failure is because of the (likely) corruption of one of the initialization scripts on the file server as a result of an abrupt loss of power. In the process of recovering the system, a guy from ITS and I found that one of the two RAIDs within the file server was running in a “degraded” state and needed to be repaired - yet another unfortunate consequence of maintaining a system that was purchased and installed before I arrived. Before we could repair the RAID, we wanted to backup the data somewhere. The problem with that idea is we have 2 TB (as in 2000 GB) of data to backup. It makes for a long story that I will tell another time.