First work day of 2018

george
1

Trundled back to work this morning.

Over the holiday period I’ve observed that one of my network segments (the one which I’m using to set the new file/print/active domain controller/etc up for the company network upgrade, stopped responding.

Assumed the NAS shitted itself as usual, but was not too worried as I have backups, and it is not used yet anyway.

So, when I arrived at work, I found the NAS and server is 100%. My attention then turned to the PC hosting the firewall and network router (all VM’s).

Completely dead.

Upon closer inspection, I found that the CPU fan somehow worked itself loose and the CPU burnt itself out, which is weird as the latest Intel CPU’s are supposed to throttle themselves when overheating. (i3 CPU).

Anyways, trundled off to get another motherboard, fit it, also dead. Tried another PSU, still no luck.

At this point I moved this PC to one side, for reprogramming (with a hammer) at a later stage, and commissioned another PC (which I was using to test powershell scripts and RAID arrays on).

Fired it up, works, Add extra RAM, fired it up again, still good.

Moved the HDD from the old PC over to the new one, and let Server2016 start up.

Everything came back up beautifully, except for the onboard NIC which Server2016 had an issue with. Faffed around with this for a few minutes (including locating and installing the original NIC device driver from the manufacturer’s website), then decided that the onboard NIC can go blow hairy and sweaty goat balls.

Fortunately this problem was solved with the addition of an USB NIC. (derp durr). Traffic over the USB NIC will be low, so it should not be an issue for now.

That was the only IT issue that I first faced in 2018. What about you guys?

I blame the Grinch.

edit : started the original motherboard up, now it works. o_O

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Well @Ook, you got lucky mate. :slight_smile:

I got a call on my mobile before my start time (which is 8am) yesterday morning - it’s $CustomerServiceTeamLeader. “Phones are down” she says.

This is code for “we cannot make external inbound or outbound calls” - the phones still work internally.

We’ve been havening issues with a particular box that converts SIP into ISDN for quite a while, and rebooting has fixed it every time, but this time - nope.

So I work backwards - reboot the SIP router… nope. Reboot the endpoint device… nope. Lots of red lights on the endpoint device though.

I call $telco and sit in a queue for 15 minutes just to be told that that department only does A whereas I want B, they’ll transfer me now… and sit in another queue for a further 20 minutes.

While sitting on hold I get a couple of mobile phones ready for $customerSupport and divert the main number to one of them so they can continue to operate, at least a little bit (the other one is for outgoing calls).

2 more shunts and an hour later and I’ve had enough, so I call $accountExec whose phone just rings out.

I call a few other numbers, to no avail. In the meantime, some dude calls to say that the service is back up. Uhh, no. :face_with_raised_eyebrow: A bit of to-ing and fro-ing, he says “oh I’m from the data team and data is up… I’ll hand this over to the voice team”.

Eventually I decided to SMS $accountExec who gave me details of another guy that could help… and help he did! Finally, at about 1415 hours, a tech from the right department was despatched to our job - 6 hours after initial contact was made.

Nobody took much notice of my bleating about the red lights, though, until I mentioned it to the tech.

The primary fault was fixed at around 1530 (and hey look, all those red lights are now green!) but there persisted stability issues so the tech is still working on that… we’ll see what happens when he calls me back in about an hour.

Fun times.

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This is how you end up with some random person’s contact info that you call to actually get shit done. You give this number out and use it as the official contact for a few years. Then when they quit you can’t get any service out of anyone since no one even knows the account manager’s name anymore.

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Very true. I’ve saved that dude’s contact details.

5

First day of work 2018 -

I got to tell my boss that I’m leaving the company in a month to go work for one of our vendors. For a lot more money. I also run the day-to-day operations and there’s nobody to replace me.

But I’ve documented all my daily tasks, my projects (both active and backlogged), and any tribal knowledge that I may have.

I told the company that they could easily spin me back on as a vendor instead of an FTE. They’re shopping around to see what their other options are.

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Welcome to the madness, @DigitalShield! Soul check to the right, weapons check to the left. Beware of the rat, though he hasn’t been around as much lately. :slight_smile:

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I made it through Catholic Military School. One could posit that I have no soul left :wink:

Thank you for the welcome and happy Friday!

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