Pulling out my hair

We have had the computer system at the dental office for 7 years. It's a beautiful system that my dad and I put together, and it has run flawlessly all this time.

Last Friday I tried to remote into the office, and I could not. However, my family had just arrived in town for Savanna's baptism, and it was nothing urgent, so I didn't worry about it. From time to time, our modem randomly gives out a new IP address, and then I have to go into the router and see what the new IP is, change settings and I'm in again. I figured this had happend. Oh, if it were that simple.

Saturday my dad and I went to the office to see what was going on, and the server was off. We determined that the power supply had gone bad. Saturday afternoon where do you get a new power supply for a Dell Poweredge server? That's right. Nowhere.

We headed home to see if we could find a place in town or online to get one overnighted by Monday, and had no luck. At the same time, my dad went out to check if our BBQ was working for the big BBQ we were having after the baptism, and dicovered the burner had completely corroded through in about 4 places over the winter. So it was off to Home Depot to buy a new burner, which we installed and then washed the black gunk off of our hands just in time to get Savanna to the church in time for her baptism.

Then we had family over for the dinner and fire, which made it quite impossible to worry about the computer. Ironically, my dad had 2 of the exact power supplies I needed at his work in SLC. I thought very seriously about buying him a $600 last-minute plane ticket to fly home Sunday and get them for me and then fly back. I really should have done that.

Instead, we borrowed a blank machine from someone in our ward, and went down Sunday night and turned it into a temporary server. I had a backup of all of the data and images we needed in the clouds, which I was able to download. It took about 10 hours to get the new machine loaded up with software and all the workstations pointed in the right direction. We were there until 3AM.

The new power supplies arrived today, and I shoved them into place, and we had power. Only problem is that the button battery that keeps the BIOS settings in the event of no power had gone dead. The server has power, the hard drives are good, but it cannot figure out how to boot.

I want to cry.

In the meantime, the office has been able to remain functional, but I am worrying about how I am going to mesh the old database that was backed up with the new data from this week. We are missing all the data from last Thursday, as the shut down happened before the backup ran Thursday night. To complicate things, when I installed Dentrix on the server, it forced me to do an update that the other workstations had not had yet, and this update changed the version of the database, so the original backup from last week is now a different version than what the office is running now. To add to the fun, this software update forced me on Sunday night/monday morning to go around to all the workstations and also run the update.

Now I need to find a genius who can reconfigure the server BIOS to find my operating system and boot up. I have no idea about that kind of stuff. And my dad isn't here anymore, and it's kind of hard to figure this out over the phone.

Stress.