October 31 – Nov. 4th

Working on the project duplicating tapes and doing the Quality Check for them and going through a lot of security and signing papers to just receive simple things. Due to the importance of the tapes everything has to be documented and recorded, so if anything happens they know who to point the finger at. Still working 12+ hours a day.

October 24th – 28th

Continued working on the project til late at the night, we are trying our best to finish as soon as possible. Because we faced a week and a half of problems and couldn’t start the project on time and Khafji Joint Operations are breathing down our necks to finish this on time.

Wednesday October 21st

Continued with the tape duplication till 2 PM when we had to leave to Khobar.

Tuesday October 20th

Started the day by showing 3 KJO employees on how to do the Quality check using Pro-source and manually by going through the logs that we keep saving on each system. Since we didn’t want to interrupt each others work, we suggested that each night before we leave the office that we would transfer all the logs into a USB then put them on a spare SUN system so that the KJO employees can go over them without getting in our way. We finished a box and started a new one but decided to leave around 8 PM.

Monday October 19th

Continued working on the project, received two boxes of magnetic tapes and stayed till 9 PM copying the tapes. We finished one box but were having problems with the tape drives, due to some error messages so we had to turn them off and call it a day.

Sunday October 18th

Received a second box of tapes and continued the duplication project after we received the cleaning tapes for the tape drives, stayed at work till 9 pm. Which is when we finished the box of empty tapes that were given to us earlier during the day.

Saturday October 17th

Arrived at Khafji around 10 AM, was told by a fellow co-worker to check the remaining tapes we have left which is around 12 tapes, 6 of them which are new and haven’t been touched and the other 6 need to be double checked to see if they have been copied correctly. I also attended a Petrel training for a few hours, which my location manager recommended me to attend.

Wednesday October 14th

Since we had trouble with a few tapes the day before, we showed our co-worker the errors we were facing and he recommended using another command that might copy it without any problems. It was a script that he had, written in C and he was trying to get it to run on the system but was having trouble. And asked me to look into it and see what the problem was. After changing a few things in the script itself, making it point to the right source files and makefile and so on. We got it working but when we use the script it doesn’t generate a log that we can use for a quality check. So i recommended adding a line to the script in the for loop, to actually show us what file number it is at, so that we know how many files it copied exactly and would help us with the quality check. We had to leave work at 1 PM since the Schlumberger driver is going to be at the compound at 2 PM and we left for Khobar.

Tuesday October 13th

We began copying the tapes and double checking the tapes with the procedure that our co-worker recommended and it seemed like everything was working fine. Had a few problems with a few tapes but it was due to hardware problems within the IBM 3590, we stayed at work till around 11 PM copying as many tapes as we can. And we had two workstations that the tape drives needed cleaning, so we had to stop using them since it won’t be possible to use them without cleaning them. We copied 20 tapes, if it wasn’t for the 2 other workstations we could of finished the whole box which consists of 30 tapes.

Monday October 12

Our manager recommended a few ways on solving the problem after looking at it, but nothing worked. So we waited for our specialist with tape drives to arrive. And he did in the afternoon, and it seems like he solved the problem. There was no problem to beging with, when we copied the tapes we got that the destination was bigger then the source which he explained was due to the “tcopy” command which makes an exact duplicate of the source tape, even if there was some empty space it would copy that. And he explained to us that since the copy was like a xerox copy, even the empty blocks were taking space in the destination. And due to that, the destination always seemed bigger then the source but it was an exact and correct copy. He tested it out with a tape and rechecked it using pro-source and they were both identical.So now the plan is to copy the tapes using the tcopy command and then double check that they’re the same through the pro-source program. He told us that we would due more tests the next day to double check everything before starting the project.