How a morning shouldn't start... the night prior perhaps?
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Ok so many of you get called by bosses, told the network is down, and required to run into work and get the issue fixed no matter what time it is correct? It could be 2am, and your ass has to get out of bed and book it to the office to fix a routing loop. This is where my job is weird... I don't have a company cell phone, they have been told if I'm not at work call my vice president, if he deems its needed for me to come in... he'll call me... on my personal cell... of this I'm not happy about. Now this isn't where it just starts to get weird, but this is where my morning begins to suck... 5:35 last night the people who monitor our servers calls me to tell me the network is down... he's suppose to call my vice president so I'm not exactly sure why he's going straight to me... but per my contract I'm not to come to work unless the vice president calls me. Needless to say my nerves were on end all night anticipating a call from the VP, as in... I wanted to get called so I could come in and fix the broken stuff.
Fast forward to this morning. I show up 30 minutes early to give myself leeway in case the VP says "fix this now", and he did. Run to the switches and notice they aren't doing ANYTHING. Something has caused our switches to lock up, and I'm not sure what, but I can do a quick unplug and plug back in to get 'em back up and running. Relatively simple, I'll attempt to find the cause of the outage, odds are i'll never find it since the outage was 14 hours ago.
I WISH IT STOPPED THERE!!!! The outage didn't just knock our network out, it seems two machines got BSOD'd over night, one of them a windows 7 laptop from 2 years ago, and one of 'em a 7 year old work station (its getting replaced soon, don't worry I'm working on it). So now I'm stuck restoring the windows 7 computer back to the night prior, I believe that was caused by a corrupt update, as for the 7 year old computer.... no effing clue what caused that. All the while I have users coming up to me saying "my outlook won't work, my CAD won't close" blah blah blah, basically people who need to learn how to turn off their stuff over night, don't and get upset when the network crash affects their network oriented software's.
BUT IT GETS BETTER!!! While I'm in the middle of dealing with two BSOD's, a handful of obnoxious users, a user on our NEWEST DELL DESKTOP!!! From August of last year, "I have a black screen on my computer"... two BSOD's, 1 black screen, dead network.... this day is fun... the black screen displays no BIOS, displays no signs of life, keyboard and mouse get no power... looks like it'll be a serious warranty issue, I've already reported my claim to my Dell rep since I don't have time to sit on a phone call to solve one problem while I have a handful of other issues going on.
And one guy has the nerve to stop me and go "the printer is broken and I don't know how to fix it"... IT SAYS ITS OUT OF INK, GO GET AN INK CARTRIDGE AND PUT IT IN!!!!
Not having a good day... not having a good day at all....
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Sounds like a fun time, and these are the experiences you cut your teeth on Been here done this got the tshirts........
In hindsight, I probably would have called the VP and told them I was called directly, and let him deal with that mix up.
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Also for the ink, maybe you should make a colorful flow chart in large bold print with pretty pictures. Complete with memes
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My guess is a power surge.
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Amber light on the front of the workstation displaying the number 3, CPU failure. The pro support guy said "odds are the slot on the motherboard died, so we'll send you a new motherboard by tomorrow and a tech to install. Seeing as his PC popped the same time the network died... I'm curious if his workstation had something to do with a network outage....
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@RAM. said:
Amber light on the front of the workstation displaying the number 3, CPU failure. The pro support guy said "odds are the slot on the motherboard died, so we'll send you a new motherboard by tomorrow and a tech to install. Seeing as his PC popped the same time the network died... I'm curious if his workstation had something to do with a network outage....
Do you have proper UPS protection on the network gear? If not I'm going with Scott's guess too. Power surge, and a nasty one.
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@Bill-Kindle let me check the switches, I believe they are plugged into a smart UPS1500
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That sucks. Are things improving any?
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@StrongBad said:
That sucks. Are things improving any?
I was suppose to set up a webinar at 12:00 because well... sitting at your desk is way too complicated... and I wasn't reminded until 11:57... glad we're using a workstation that's 14 years old to stream video... only took 7 minutes to boot up....
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@RAM. Sounds like you're having one of those "when it rains it pours" days. On the upside, it's nice to have one of those every once in a while to reinforce to management why they need an IT guy.
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@Dominica good point. Job security.
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Aliens. That explains the other guy too... he was trying to warn you.
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@lillucia said:
Aliens. That explains the other guy too... he was trying to warn you.
.... that he is an alien.
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RAM it was happen to me many times, Sometimes they will just knock on my door and telling me there's something wrong in network. It happen that our President went to our Apartment because they cannot resolve the problem with Internet Connection. I am glad now we have additional people in our team so there's someone left here during night.
PS. i love doing this and of course i am happy to save my Boss Money, I just cant imagine how many operators get idled if i cant come on time, But sometimes its not really fun -
Have you spoken to anyone at the office to see if he has done this before?