At the very end of the day Sunday, the the Land of Færie point-of-sale computer died with an electrical fault in the hard drive controller board, before that day’s backups had run. (Backups are set to run at 23:00 when no one’s around to complain that it bogs down the network.) Things could have been a lot worse; for one thing, it could have happened when I didn’t have multiple generations of good recent backups and only lost the current day’s transactions, and for another it could have happened when I wasn’t there to deal with it right that minute. A five-minute call to the Auric support center in Countryburg got me a replacement drive on the way, and it arrived Tuesday as expected.
That was about the last thing that went right. I installed the drive and burned half an hour or so in chat to Countryburg, trying to find the utility that lets me reinstall the hidden diagnostic partition to the drive. I found it’s not available except on some of the portables CDs, and I wasn’t driving half an hour to Circulith and half an hour back just to get one. I’ll use the diags on CD if I ever need them.
Got the OS reinstalled, got the drivers reinstalled so I had connectivity, got Norton Internet Security installed, burned half an hour trying to figure out how to use the totally non-intuitive backup manager (Yosemite Tapeware 7.0 SP4A) to restore the POS system’s data files. Then I discovered the two computers weren’t connecting. SOMEtimes the POS computer would see the office computer, but never vice versa. There went another hour and a half, figuring out that Norton had turned on its software firewall when it installed, and Windows turned on its firewall when it installed, and between them they were blocking all communication. I got them both swatted down at last (we have a hardware firewall, so I never have used—or wanted—either one), established communications and shared the drives that needed sharing. The backup software still wouldn’t restore the files, and while wrestling with that I nearly made a Too-Tired Stupid Mistake that would have ruined my most recent backup. It took that as a sign to quit, and went home at midnight; I couldn’t unwind enough to sleep until close to two.
Wednesday night before Poly Dinner, I called Yosemite (there went $89 for a support incident, which baleboosteh had to pay for) to find someone to explain to me how to work it. Thank the ghods, the guy I talked to was pretty on-the-ball, told me where I went wrong, and walked me through setting up a restore job. I launched it, it ran, and STILL nothing restored. Meantime, I was fighting the copy of the POS software installed on the office computer; it had to come out and be reinstalled to re-establish the file relationships. The uninstaller went rogue and removed some DLLs and OCXs that Norton AV used; it promptly threw a fit and announced It Had Been Tampered With! Yanked out NAV to reinstall—or tried to yank it out. It wouldn’t go away. I fought that for two hours and more, trying to pick out enough of the Registry débris that it would condescend to reinstall. I never did succeed. This time I made the Too-Tired Stupid Mistake That Means I Better Quit NOW well after midnight, and got home a little before one. Again, it was a while before I could unwind enough to sleep.
By this morning, I’d had maybe nine hours of sleep since Tuesday. My voice started the day with the bucket-of-rocks tone it gets when I’m exhausted, and never got better. I managed to stagger through the day at the Empire, drove from there straight to the Land of Færie and got back on the phone with Yosemite. Mercifully, I got another on-the-ball tech who identified the problem right away (I’d set up the backup software on both systems as controllers, rather than one controller and one client) and walked me through several obscure .INI file edits that fixed the problem. This time the backup restored as sweetly as you please, the POS software could find all the files it wanted and rang up transactions correctly. I liked that part of it.
In one last spark, what was left of my brain had the gumption to go research the error message the Norton installer kept pitching back. Five minutes’ Google search showed me the problem: Norton gets its hooks so far into the operating system, and its uninstaller works so badly, that you have to use a special tool you download from Symantec to remove the fuckin’ thing. I got the tool and ran it, and it cleaned up the mess, after which I was able to reinstall NIS and SystemWorks on the office computer, leaving it fully working for the first time in three days. I got to go home at 9:40, a personal-best for the week.
There are still a couple of things to be done, like reinstalling MS Outlook on the POS system, but that’ll just have to go until Monday. Friday night I have a date with TerribleLynne, although I still have no idea at all what we’re going to do, and Saturday evening my brother and mother will be in town and want to go out to dinner with us—which may rate its own post afterward. It depends on how annoyed I am.
The etheristic banjo climbs into the distribution pool. Fnord.
5 Responses to Exhaustion—it’s what’s for dinner