So this week at work, I was a lucky participant in the Disaster Recovery (DR) exercise. My involvement in the DR exercise this year (it is performed yearly) was that I sat in an un-cooled room with a lot of other lucky participants and we all did some things and everything generally went well.

Here is the DR in a nutshell – if primary server goes down, the users still need to be able to access the system and do their work with minimum downtime. This is accomplished (in very basic terms) by switching the IPs of the DNS entries of the servers. We were tasked with simulating a production failure and falling back to the backup servers.

That started Tuesday (6/3/2008) and I was on property overnight from 11pm Tuesday to 11am Wednesday. After that was completed and it was given the thumbs up, it was time to undo it – now we have to be back on the production server. That started at 11pm Wednesday night and lasted until 4am Thursday morning.

Now my sleep cycle is screwed up. Here’s to hoping that I won’t be here next year to experience that again!

Also, I have a phone interview for a contract job here in Orlando that I most likely won’t accept even if it’s offered to me. With the economy the way it is, I can’t put my family’s well-being at risk by taking a 6 month contract versus staying with my company with a 2 year contract. The money is a lot better but in taking the 6 month contract but what would I do in 6 months if the project actually completed on-time or the client just decided to cancel my contract? I’d be putting my family at risk if I couldn’t find another job or contract quickly.

If I am offered the contract, I’ll have to talk to Meri more about it.