My council IT support - did a cracking job!

No I'm not being sarcastic for once, they really have done well today! :D

I came into work at 7:30am with my Dell servers beeping away like crazy, two drives on my RAID5 array had gone within 10 minutes of each other. Pupil data for half the school was gone, pupil servers weren't online, DHCP was gone..and that the server admin utility was essentially crying as the number of faults it was reporting on the PowerVault.

Contacted my LEA, the server team had someone on site helping me less than 45mins later. HE handled the call from Dell whilst I fended off staff and talked to senior management. Dell had replacement drives with us within a hour which we fitted and he's been sorting out all of the niggly problems all day whilst I've been watching and learning :wink:

Currently restoring from backup, have lost next to nothing. A few minor issues to iron out but frankly I'm happy to leave them until monday morning, after the day we've had I need to get my butt home for a beer!

I could have sorted most of the problems on my own but it was very nice to know that I had the help there when I really needed it. Staff were going mental this morning and obviously I can't blame them for doing so but having someone else to handle what sounded like a Dell support call from hell was ace on it's own!

:lol:

Christ... I think I'd go jump off the tallest part of the building if I lost 2 disks :?

Interesting how your LEA got so involved though.. unless it's a problem with their demarkation point or our link to them they don't have anything to do with us

I assume he probably gets the servers from the LEA so gets a certain level of support too

That is the reason we DONT go through them for our servers - from what Ive heard ours isnt quite as good!

We're the same, unless its a SIMS server or an internet problem, they arnt interested and arnt contracted to be

We have central IT that can provide support for everything from desktop, comms, web to the servers. The quality of support varies massively from each section and generally I don't rely on the desktop chaps for anything at all. Some of their staff are great but others are very poor and you never know who'll turn up to help you!

The server team generally are pretty good though, I get on pretty well with their team leader which probably helps and the chap who they always send out to give me a hand is top notch. shame he's been given a 9K pay cut and will probably be leaving :(

He worked remotely over the weekend and managed to get all but 800 files back, they were coming back as mashed up rubbish but most appeared to be temp files anyway. So out of about 920,000 files we've lost 800. I think that's pretty good going!

I'm working on getting back a few more at the moment but I think we've been very lucky. It was a freak incident losing 2 of the 5 raid HDDs so quickly (within 10mins) and it's unlikely to ever happen again!

Don't say it...
DON'T SAY IT....