So at about 3:20 PM EST I am sitting at my desk finding some way to occupy my time till it hits 4 o’clock when I get an IM. I look and it is my old boss Casey looking to see if I am sitting at my desk. I tell him I am there and he comes back with the message, “your data machine has a virus”. I am thinking that he is joking because I had just sent out a message threatening people that if they don’t stop locking me out of my databases in the morning when I am trying to update them then I will be forced to revoke there access. Unfortunately he is not joking.

Casey has been transferred out of our group, but we haven’t had the oppurtunity to move the machine from his id to my id, so he is viewed as the central contact. Fortunately for us he has it in with the IBM tech support people in our building. There were half a dozen machines involved in the problem and the IBM people had called security on all but ours and was having them go and confiscate the machines because they weren’t technically being supported by IBM anymore. I give our tech guy a call and ask him how they would go about fixing the problem, and his response to me is “Format C:”.

This response was not what I was hoping for. The machine in question supports our database because it is the only machine I have with the proper Oracle version and ODBC conncetions I need for several of my databases. He then tells me to call in a ticket for repair and bring the machine back to him. So I do as I am told.

So I have been uneasy ever since I dropped the machine off thinking of all the work I am going to have to do to get the databases on there back up and running. I am looking at weeks worth of effort. I just now called back to the office and luckily the IBM tech people were able to save the day. The found the virus on my machine, which incidently was able to turn off the anti-virus on its own to run itself, and were able to wipe it off the machine.

So tomorrow morning I just need to go pick up my machine and I am back in service, which makes me very happy. And starting tomorrow my plans are to work out a back-up plan so that in case this happens again I don’t have to worry about being without my data!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2003 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.