Friday the 13th Horror Stories

In honor of this day of days I'd like to present to you my Friday the 13th Horror Story.

I work for a small I.T. Firm. As the senior technician, it's my responsibility to maintain/repair our own equipment. Like the cliche states "The plumber always has the leakiest taps". Having not had a great deal of time or funds to look after our own stuff, things are getting a little old and fragile.

This morning, while enjoying my breakfast at home, I get a call from my office manager - "There's something wrong with the server". At this point the date did not occur to me.

I get to work to discover 2 out of 4 drives and the RAID controller all failed. Simultaneously. With no warning.

Needless to say, our database, documents, email, website etc. all run from this box. Backups are OK, but I need to replace all the hardware.

Oh, and we also ran out of coffee and biscuits this morning (dun dun dun!!!!)

I'm not normally superstitious, but this is awfully coincidental.

What's happened to you on Friday the 13th?

I got stabbed! . . . In the arm . . . with a needle . . . to prove I don't have Hep.B (requirement for an upcoming job).

Okay, it's not much. My arm is still sore though.

- When I got home thursday there was a card in my mailbox saying a parcel will be at the post office by 17:00. I waited until friday to head out but the parcel still had not arrived.
- On the way home I discovered I had lost my bus transfer and have to pay again. 2 bus fares and mission not accomplished.
- Stopped for lunch. Ordered tea. The teapot did not like me, dribbled tea on the table.
- Backup waitress helped me clean up (regular waitress on break). Tried to comfort me by saying things come in threes and I should be clear for the rest of the day.
- There was a card in my mailbox from the university alumni asking me to phone in and confirm my info for the 2012 Directory. The girl asked if I would like to reserve a copy for $19.95 and after she got my credit card number said you will be billed $124.99. I thought I pay $19.95 now and the rest when the Directory is shipped. So much for things coming in threes.
- The weather is miserable - rain for an hour, stop for an hour, rain for another hour and it will continue that way until tuesday.
- Did not realize it was Friday the 13th. Should have stayed in bed.

My oldest son turned 13 on Friday the 13th. Nothing bad happened, but it was kinda cool.

Instructor mixed up the grades and names for our class.

Yesterday was actually quite good for me. Only down side was that sample measurements I'm doing for my bachelor's thesis didn't quite work out as hoped. But the samples were made earlier in the week, so I can't really blame Friday the 13th for that.

It's bad luck to be superstitious :tinfoil:

5.9 Richter scale earthquake 40 miles away from home count?
(We're all safe and sound.)

I dulled my knife cutting into staples while flattening boxes by accident Now I have to work to get the flat spots out.

My order for my IFE2 and some accessories was accepted by USPS on Thursday at 3:33 p.m. It didn't move on Friday. It is still not moving to this day. Now that's a flashaholic horror tale!

I get to work to discover 2 out of 4 drives and the RAID controller all failed. Simultaneously. With no warning.

Click to expand...

RAID controllers in my lengthy experience working with them are increasingly more likely to fail than the drives they are hosting. I'm starting to see some improvement with this on the SAN end with better MTF rates, but you should never trust your RAID controller more than the drives.

The problem is that I still run into brain damaged technicians that think this is 1997 and use idiot schemes like RAID 5 -vs- mirror driven schemes, and this compounds the problem.

blasterman said:

RAID controllers in my lengthy experience working with them are increasingly more likely to fail than the drives they are hosting. I'm starting to see some improvement with this on the SAN end with better MTF rates, but you should never trust your RAID controller more than the drives.

The problem is that I still run into brain damaged technicians that think this is 1997 and use idiot schemes like RAID 5 -vs- mirror driven schemes, and this compounds the problem.

Click to expand...

I see this a lot as well. It's a shame that the controller's aren't often as easy to replace as drives.

I was presented with a big problem the other week when I had a faulty controller and two degraded RAID 1 sets. I was instructed by the powers that be (not wise to mention specific companies here) to swap the controller before swapping any drives. This would have required me to import the foreign RAID config from the faulty RAID sets. Guess how well that would have worked.... :thinking:

Needless to say, I managed to rebuild both RAID sets, and then swap the controller. Everything's been fine since.

The big issue with RAID 5 is the size of modern drives. If you're using big drives you need to move to at least RAID 6, or multiple schemes.