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October 07, 2005

A truely great week

I've completed my first week as a member of the Solarity Group. It's been a rather interesting week, with me going to different places and meeting different people. In all, I can honestly say that this has been a fantastic first week for me.

I never realized until the past few days how much my days at WHAS would come to help me in my future endevours. A perfect example of this happened on Wednesday. I received a call from Marc around noon. A client's Exchange 5.5 server went down and didn't know what to do. I called the client and asked them if they had rebooted the server, to which they responded that they had. I asked if they had rebooted the desktop which Outlook was running, to which they replied that they had done that as well.

In a previous experience with an Exchange server at WHAS, it had crashed one afternoon right as I was going home. I checked the logs and tried to figure out what had happened. Eventually, I got Brenda from corporate on the phone and had her help me figure it out, as the log files weren't telling me anything. After many hours of going through items trying to find the exact problem, I stumbled on a support tech note on the Microsoft site that mentioned something about the log files of an Exchange 5.5 server either filling up the drive or running out of Hex numbers to replicate itself.

Well, since this was a 200GB HD I was dealing with, I doubted that it was a space issue. I checked the HD anyhow and found that I had plenty of space on the machine. I checked the log files under the mbddata directory, and sure enough there were a TON of log files. Each file was roughly 5MB in size. The second recommendation of the tech note was correct, I had hit the ceiling in Hex numbers and needed to remove all of the log files from the directory and restart the server. Once I did this, everything worked perfectly once again.

Based on the converstation that I had with the client, it reminded me exactly of this issue. Either he ran out of space or had too many log files in his directory. I drove to his location, only minutes down the road, and started looking at his Event viewer. Sure enough, he had run out of disk space on one of his hard drives where his Exchange data was stored. I checked the directory and there was 5.8 GB of log files. I highlighted all of the logs, deleted them and restarted the server. Sure enough, Exchange came up without any issues what-so-ever. The client was able to send and receive e-mails once again.

If I wasn't at WHAS, I wouldn't have known about this issue and it would've taken me a long time to figure out the problem. I guess this holds true for anyone in the field of IT ... it really is experience that makes you a good technician. No matter how much training that you have or how much "book smarts", nothing beats having the real world knowledge on your side.

Anyhow, I believe that I have shown what I am capable of to my new bosses this first week. Granted, I've had alot of information thrown at me and I've been asking alot of questions, but I think that goes to show that I'm here to take on the challenge ... to grab the bull by the horns so to speak.

I can't wait to see what lies ahead of me in the next few weeks.

~out...

Posted by ed at 09:31 PM | Comments (1)