Today has been a trial of frustrations and annoyances…. I love IT completely, but sometimes even I have a bad day.

In summary, my day:

• Personal server has crashed 2x today with no error messages or displayed panics. This is a pretty big deal, since it’s a modern box, runs about 25 of my development virtual machines and is encrypted making a PITA to boot back up, not to mention I use it daily for development and informational purposes.
• That server also runs the #geekflat network which meant calls from flatmates begging for precious internets.
• After waiting weeks (months?) for a NIC to be added to a customer server, I discovered that the engineer was trying to install a PCIe card into a totally incompatible PCI slot.
• A complex script for processing files at a customer site has been broken after the file format changed unexpectedly and needs to be fixed.
• I found a bug in my perfect code that gave me some very frustrating headaches and which I’ll have to fix.
• A customer I did support work for a year ago has a number of general desktop issues, claims these are a fault and demanding I fix it seeing as I was the one who installed anti-virus. O_o
• I got called several times by people for questions that could have been answered by themselves.

All in all, a very frustrating and annoying day. I just hope that tomorrow is better. :-/

The biggest headache is really the problems with the server instability – I rely on that server for a lot of services and having a fault that reports no specific error or message is immensly frustrating.

At this stage, I’m being to suspect some hardware – it could be PSU/CPU/RAM/MB fault which is causing inconsistant stability, but these sorts of issues are extremely difficult to try and trace down, there is nothing in the logs at this stage to indicate.

I might consider switching UPS and maybe PSUs if I need to and see if that resolves the issue – although it’s very difficult to tell since the last time this server had any stability problems was in Jan…

Arhghgh!