Blargh

First snow of the "season" today, and it came with a bite. The office (all with a few thousand residents) ended up without power for almost an hour and a half. That set things behind and led to a fair bit of scrambling.

Worse still, when the power came back on, one of our NAS devices serving as primary file storage for our prepress/ad design department didn't. Amusingly, we had just acquired a new one to replace it due to our having filled the old one up basically, but we were several days away from being ready to make the switch, with a ton of files to move and no way to get at them if the old NAS wouldn't boot.

And this is about how my mind approached it:
- Is it working? No. Restart? No. Unplug for a few minutes and restart? No.
- Nothing is powering on, so it's probably either the power supply or control board. The drives are probably fine, so the data should be okay.
- Can we put the drives in another chassis and run that? ... Theory is sound, but the only devices designed for four RAIDed drives are in use, and they may not be compatible. Plus there could be a driver conflict with the different hardware even if so.
- Any replacement that we get won't be here fast enough to get this working for tomorrow, even if we can acquire old enough hardware to. Major production impact.
- Okay, can we replace the power supply? ... We don't have anything that's the same model, but... uhh... maybe?

So I opened up an old decommissioned NAS. Different connectors. Hmm. I then eyed a couple decommissioned servers. Same form factor. That's a long shot, right? Well, I opened one up and... hmm... 300 watts... matching connectors, though more of them... maaaaybe?

In a stroke of luck, that worked. The solution is piecemeal, but hopefully only temporary as we transfer data to the new device. I want to be too full of myself, but I suspect a lot of people wouldn't even have thought to try that. Mostly, I think I just didn't want to "lose."

But... hey... at least things are reasonably functional at the moment, and I'm nearing time to go home and eat. Hmm. Dinner...

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