even paranoids have enemies #347

I get into work today, sit down at the desk, and The Boss pops up, telling me people are down and The Guy is in the network room.

With a description like that, it’s amazing that I didn’t fix it on the spot, by a quick Network Administratorial snap of the fingers.

The network looks ok and when I head out to the affected area, it looks fine there too.  The only thing out of place was the immediate jet of hot air that went up my leg when I sat down at someone’s desk.  Doing a quick mental inventory, I determined that I had not urinated on myself, there was nobody under the desk blowing up my leg, and that the hot air was being generated by what I refer to as the Heat Cannons<tm>. 

Heat Cannons are large, incredibly hot and powerful heaters that the women at work tend to have under their desks.  This is especially interesting, as they have been expressly forbidden to run them.  They can muck up their own data, as well as popping circuit breakers.  Yeah, like that will stop them.

I was back at my desk, consuming mass quantities of Code Red, when I got a call: the network was down again. 

A quick visual inspection verified that there was no network connectivity for one department.  I told them it was because of the Heat Cannon and went off to check the server room. 

Once in the server room, I got to say hello to Wire Guy, who was running fiber(cable) to another part of the building.  It’s always nice to see Wire Guy, who wanted to know if he did this.  He said most of the time it’s him tripping over wires.

Another visual inspection later, I had determined the cause of at least the second outage: the power plug was just slightly off on one of our switches, causing it to lose power.  Fortunately for me that was the end of the work emergencies.

Until I got home.

I fired up the computers to get to (home) business and POOF - the lone Windows box started cycling, not even allowing me to log in.  When I finally managed to persuade it, it ran for two minutes then spontaneously rebooted itself.  And again.  

How lovely.

Already busy with other projects, I didn’t have time to bother with this crap, so I tried running Windows tasks under linux.  It ran seamlessly.

And then the phone rang.

It was a colleague from work, who apologized profusely for bothering me, but email was down.  And the CEO had been located rather close to him for a while, asking when it would be up. 

Even more lovely.

I start remote troubleshooting, only to discover that the email server is throwing all sorts of ugly errors.  Anyone who has ever worked with MS Exchange knows what I mean.  Rather than panic (I tend to do this long after it’s actually necessary), I did what any good admin would do: `When in doubt, reboot.’

POOF - one working email server.

Ok, I gotta go figure out what’s wrong with my lone Windows box (aside from the operating system).

Powered by ScribeFire.