neurological dryer lint

you want to see some proof that God exists? become a sysadmin.

let me start off with this. my prized 587-day uptime on my gateway/firewall Redhat 6.2 box is gone. the power supply on it decided to die in the middle of an hour-long power failure in our building... and all of our UPS's also ran out of juice.

i drove back in, pretty frustrated at the ridiculously long power loss that no other people i knew seemed to be experiencing... but excited that i finally had an excuse to listen to Metallica's St. Anger album, because it perfectly matched my mood.

when i got there things were a wreck. power had been on for about twenty minutes. a few servers were up. the kicker came when i tried to power on the gateway. it wouldn't turn on. thinking maybe it'd be as simple as a bad power cable, i swapped those. hah. tried a few more outlets. nope. feeling sick that it was the motherboard or the power supply, i opened it up. unplugged the PS, tried it solo. nope.

here's the big problem. we have no other systems old enough in our building that are using this particular power supply, so i don't have a replacement. meanwhile every single person in the company is stopping in, trying to joke around with me to 'lighten' the mood. i want to break something pretty badly right now. so then i'm thinking, maybe this other really old spare PS will work. nope, won't even plug into the motherboard.

now i'd been working on a replacment firewall for a while, surprise. building it out of fedora core 2. but it's still in its infancy stage as a server. there is no chance i can learn iptables and figure out how to do vpn-over-masq on the 2.6 kernel without an internet connection. but something seems to be telling me to try it anyway.

i plug it in, boot it up.

it's at this stage something dawns on me. i'm very, very good at faking like i know what i'm doing. in most cases, though, i'm clueless as to anything but theory. i can dream up what might work but making it work is a really long, drawn out process involving a lot of google and stuff. i've been cutting corners and taking shortcuts my whole life and that doesn't help me out much in this situation.

the box boots. i configure both NIC's to handle traffic. one of them decides to spit out random error messages every time the module is loaded. i can't remember everything i need to do to activate masquerading - as stated above, normally i'd just google for it when i needed it. so i'm sitting on the server room floor, a failing system in front of me, a couple of dead ones in pieces all around me. sweating like crazy, dirty, bleeding from a dozen gashes from opening up systems and ripping them apart. i'm going to collapse under the pressure. people are calling my cell, asking why they can't VPN in, why their webmail isn't working. work around me has gone to a halt.

i'm dramatizing this to demonstrate the circumstances where i will run to God crying, scared. it's when i'm crowded around by hopelessness, closing around me, crushed like an angry mob. i stop, think. haven't you seen this dozens of times? sitting at this very monitor, you've had nothing left and pleaded with your Lord and he has restored everything. what are you THINKING?

so i pray. God, make this work. give me some ideas. point me somewhere. intervene as you have before, i've seen it happen and i know it can.

the busted NIC still won't come up or transmit any packets. i guess i could switch out the NIC from one of the old ones in the old box...

or... i could swap out hard drives and NIC's into this new system. hopefully Linux won't kernel panic from the new MB/proc/memory/video... it's a longshot but it might work. could this be God's suggestion? it's frickin crazy. it came out of left field, something i would have never thought of on my own.

so i do it, swap drives and NICs. power it on.

it boots. fine. perfectly. scripts run, and our connection is live, routing is working, masquerading is active. i head down the hall and have some people test stuff. amazing. it works.

i don't expect everyone to look at this stuff and say, wow, miracle. i guess it's a little more personal. this type of interaction is more than a set of circumstances, it's an emotion that my heart is expressing that it doesn't express any other time except when God directly intervenes. it won't make sense to anyone else but me, i think, because i'm in the middle of the experience and it feels different than anything else. i feel warm and safe and energized in a way that couldn't come from within.

so it's cool that God does things like this, answers us, confuses us, teaches me by facing trials of many kinds. unlike james' description in his letter, i doubt. a lot. it's only in the midst of my panic and fear that my doubt dissipates. because the rest of the time i'm capable of controlling things. so. i need more of this? it's weird. and cool. either way i'm sitting here writing this, feeling an exhilaration my mind rarely sees. i'm deeply moved and sure of the reason. and totally exhausted :)