Crazy First Day Back
Today was the first day back from the long weekend where we went to Philadelphia for Liza's marathon. It was an amazingly crazy day that had more than it's share of issues and problems that I had to overcome. Not a fun day - not by a long shot.
First, I had more of the 'NFS not found' errors on my Sun box. This was supposed to have been cleared up with the new networking and cables, but it wasn't. This was made infinitely worse today as I had problems with the production MarketData server and without my Sun box to develop/debug, I was in the dark. They came and replaced the network card in the box and reconfigured it to use that new NIC as opposed to the one on the motherboard. This took about an hour from the time I started 'yelling' about the problem and it's impact to production, so that's not too bad, but that it was out after having told them to replace the NIC weeks ago is a little troubling. But I hope this is it for this problem.
Next, there was the problem that I needed that box to solve. That was, the database that I get symbol mappings from was not returning data as it should have. If I went into SQSH, the data looked to be there, but when I went in from the program and the SQLAPI++ libraries, it wasn't. After a bit I gave up and pointed my code to the primary database (as opposed to the read-only replicant) and it worked perfectly. I had seen a few database issues this morning early, but thought they were all fixed up. I was wrong.
Later this afternoon, I saw that the read-only database was working again, and I'll switch production back at the end of the day. I try to be a good corporate citizen as much as possible and sing the read-only database is something they want me to do. I'll comply as long as it's working, but when it fails, it's back to the primary as the users have to come first.
After I got that fixed up, I had to fix up problems with my server and the EQSVal libraries. It turns out that with the most recent version of the libraries (v7.3.24b) you have to set things that were once defaults in previous versions. This isn't horrible, and the fix was simple - but figuring out what needed to be done was the problem. Thankfully, the EQSVal guys were helpful and once I generated them a test datafile they were able to tell me the issue and what to do.
After that, I had to make several changes to the web-based editor for my server. Nothing major, but there were some edge conditions that were showing up as records in lists that should not have been there. The perl processing and filtering was about as good as I could do in a single pass, so I had to add a second pass on the data to further clean it up. This will take a little bit more on the execution, but it'll keep the records cleaner and therefore make it less confusing to the users. Good things to do.
Finally, I got the most recent version of a driver from the internal price source folks at the Bank. I needed this because their mapping rules from Reuters to what we needed weren't capable of being exchange-specific enough to really hit the points we needed hit. With this update, my contact Todd is able to get the rules as specific as necessary and that's great. I'm hoping that these work out in test over the next few days so we can roll them out to production as soon as possible. These are tickers that the users have been wanting more smarts in, but haven't been able to deliver due to the limited rules on Todd's side of things.
That's about it. It's been a monster of a day. I'm looking forward to calming down and taking it easy for a bit.