Call from Fritz Graf
in Tandem'sZürich round lunch time: the Swiss
Bundesanwaltschaft in Bern had a disk
problem. Jakob („Köbi”) Binder, the customer engineer, had replaced a failed disk, and he
couldn't revive (rebuild) the mirror: the revive failed with error 12, FEINUSE:
“File in use”.
That didn't make any sense at all, of course, but we had seen a couple of cases where it
happened before, first in Taranto, the
next in Helsinki. To investigate I
really needed to go on site, and both of these locations weren't easily reachable
from Frankfurt am Main. On the other
hand, the customers weren't prepared to wait with a degraded disk while I found my way to
their site. So I was quite happy when I discovered that it had happened only 420 km and 3
hours' drive from Frankfurt. Arranged to go there immediately.
But Yvonne's family is from Switzerland. Couldn't she come
with me? Of course she could. Called her up on the phone
Kreditanstalt für
Wiederaufbau. The entire KfW phone system was down!
Off back home, packed, got the dog (Dimitri de la Polianka) and
headed off back to Frankfurt, where I was able to load Yvonne into the car and continue
South. As planned, we met Köbi at an Autobahn service area just the other side
of Basel, and went on to Bern together.
There I played around a bit and found my problem. Tandem made its own disk controllers, and
they weren't completely compatible. To avoid trashing disks formatted for a different
controller, they stored some flag information on the first sector to identify the
controller. And the disk that Köbi had put in the drive had been formatted by a different
controller, so the disk process reported a mismatch error. And PUP, the peripheral
utility program that did the revive, saw this as “file in use”.
How did we fix the problem? I can't recall the fix on that evening. Either formatting the
pack or replacing it with a compatibly formatted one would have done the trick.
Finally back to the hotel that Fritz had booked for us, the Hotel Bellevue Palace. Not the cheapest hotel I
have stayed at; in fact, it might have been the most expensive. But it was past 21:30, and
the restaurant was closed. But a waiter was prepared to find a little something for us, so
in we went, with Dimitri in a corner beside us, while the waiter told us what he could get.
It all sounded wonderful, though we had our doubts about the dessert of strawberries
with crème de Gruyère. But it seems this was deliberately misleading on his part: «
crème » is French for cream, and
La Gruyère is a district in
the Canton of Fribourg better
known for its cheese.
We accepted: after all, this was a top-class restaurant, and even if the strawberries were
served with cheese, that would be an experience. The waiter was clearly disappointed that
his joke had failed. And the food was, indeed, excellent.
The following day we got up late, of course, and had a breakfast which definitely went down
as the most expensive I have ever had. From recollection, it cost about 80 CHF, and got me
into trouble when I put it on my expenses. They paid for Yvonne's overnight stay, since it didn't increase the cost, but the breakfast broke the bank.
Back to the Bundesanwaltschaft to wrap up a couple of things. And then? It was past midday. By
the time we got back to Frankfurt it
would be evening, and the next day was 17 June, the Day of
German Unity and the beginning of a long weekend. So we decided to stay in
Switzerland and look for her family
in Buchs. It seems that we
went through Zürich and on down the lake
to the east:
When we got to Buchs, we went looking for Hans Ködderitzsch, a relative of Yvonne's, but we
didn't find him, nor any other relative. I don't recall where we spent the night.
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