Disaster Recovery in Real Life

Monday night we lost power at the Church and it stayed off until this morning.  Tomorrow is payday, so we needed to process payroll yesterday so it could be sent off by 1PM today.  So it was time to implement our disaster recovery plan.  Payroll is the only real critical business process we needed to worry about.  So I called Ozark Christian College to see if they had power and PTL they did.  So I grabbed our server, a couple of computers from our Accountint Department, a printer, cables, router, switch, etc and we relocated to a conference room at OCC and got payroll done, including Christmas bonuses!!

This morning power was back on at the church so I went back to OCC and grabbed our gear then hurried back to the church to get everything back together before too many people got there.  Everything went fine, except our Internet was down, but it was a problem with our cable provider and I couldn’t do anything about it.  There was also a bit of a problem with our phone system.  After not having power for over three days, our Samsung Prostar DCS had completely reset to default.  We lost all configuration data including extensions and all call routing info.  So we could call out, but we couldn’t receive calls because once they came in, the system didn’t know where to route them.

So I spent all day today reprogramming EVERYTHING by hand.  The Samsung Prostar DCS is an older system, without any computer interface, so I had to reprogram everything from the keypad of my phone.  To make things more complicated we have a school and a church in the same building using the same phone system, and it’s up to the Prostar DCS to route the calls accordingly.  PTL there were detailed notes taken when the system was setup, and I had them all in a file.  I came to one point where I couldn’t figure out what to do, and at that time our Internet came back on and Google quickly came to the rescue.  I was able to find the missing configuration info I was looking for and got everything setup, except the fax lines.  Right after that the Internet went down again, but by that time I was pretty much done for the day.

Tomorrow I hope to finish up all the details that I didn’t have time to worry about today.