8 weeks without D: Week 1

Okay, so the main developer/sys administrator, D, is away for 8 weeks - and we get to mind the shop without him. He left us lots of instructions and assured us we would be fine. Us - well there are two of us (me and J), except one of us (J) will be also away for four of those weeks. So for four weeks it will just be me...

So I thought I'd keep track of any issues that occurred while D was away so I can report accurately when he returns.

Week 1

Day 1 (Monday): 

• Colleague shows up at door way and reports an error in a system that we run for them - error message says to check error logs.
• Look up documentation, find name of machine the service is running on, log in and go to log directory
• No error.log file - exception.log and update.log and access.log
• check exception.log - some strange messages but none that look relevant. Colleague looking over shoulder and starting to look worried.
• Assure colleague that all will be fine and I'll investigate and get back to him with an update shortly.
• Colleague walks away despondently.
• Shut office door - deep breath: check all logs, find error message in update log, actually understand error message (!!) - unicode character not being handled correctly.
• Not able to fix code but find offending document and replace unicode char with ascii equivalent, rerun import and ta-da! 
• Report success to colleague and pat myself on back.

Day 2 (Tuesday):

• Having a half day off.
• Receive email while sitting in hair-dressers: shibboleth problem on new site identified by J. 
• Ignore problem - J on the job.

Day 3 (Wednesday)

• Morning - received email from D at 6:30am. Plone security patch to be released on the 10th of December. We will need to patch 17 plone sites on the 11th of December.
• Received email from J - he is on leave on 11th of December; "we" becomes "me" *sigh*
• Afternoon - remember shibboleth problem. Help identify if problem is at our end of the IDP end - naturally it is at our end.
• Know very little about shibboleth - bring in the big guns: N - PhD student. 
• N hacks a quick fix so system is up and running but need to find time to fully debug and fix problem - something wrong with SSL on that machine in particular.

Day 4 (Thursday)

• Boss wonders in to the office and mentions that a site we are nominally involved in doesn't seem to be working. Checked the VM status and it seems to be alive but the site isn't working.
• Have decided this is not my problem until people running the site ask for help.

Day 5 (Friday 15/11)

• All quiet on the western front - may be too quiet!