Mission-critical mishaps

[triadruid]

So on Friday we moved our office from the Multipurpose Center to City Hall, because they're remodeling our wing of the 100+ year-old building. That's cool, except for the part where no one has set up a Help Desk ticket to move the computers (I'm pretty sure they remembered the phones), so I trucked them over at 5pm myself and set them up.

Monday Tuesday morning comes, and we boot them up; mine works fine once I find the valid network connection on my side of the new office, but co-worker DD has no network connection. I try switching her with the connection that's running to the idle computer in this room, and she gets connectivity back. Great!

I go on with my morning, and try setting up to find the local printers...can't find them, that's odd. Can't find the downtown server, in fact. So I go reconnect that "idle computer" which just happens to be the storage/print server for this floor of City Hall (did I mention this used to be the IT office for my department, before they got consolidated?). Ooops. Printer is a little backlogged, but now I can find it. Great.

But now my coworker no longer has network/Internet access again, which is a large part of our jobs even when I'm not on LJ. There's another possible CAT-5 plug across the room, but the network cable attached to her computer is too short to reach. The server, though, has a 20-25' cable coiled up under the desk, so it can reach the network jack 3' away. One quick switcheroo and I can test it...only when I unplug the cable from the back of the server, it shuts down.

Whaaa?? Huh??? Security measures? Black helicopters? Am I about to be fired for removing the wrong end of the wrong cable? A quick call to the former IT guy yields nothing except that the server is "an old girl", and may have decided to crap out for unknown reasons. He gives me the name of the person monitoring it from ITD now, but first I decide to troubleshoot a little longer.

And do you know what I discovered, friends and neighbors? The problem was not with the network cable, but a power cable with a short in it. The downtown server has a twitchy power cable. Good gods... as if running it on Windows wasn't bad enough.

Comments

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Nothing but the best for the gubmint. If it makes you feel any better, our whole ERP shot craps this morning, and they're not sure whether it's going to resurface or not. Stellar grade A.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

Uhhh, the thing your tech guys spent several months/years/decades/eons preparing right before they sold the company?

Stellar, as you say.

[celticwhistlin.livejournal.com]

That goes along with the lighting and power fun this morning. They sent us an email letting us know that the power would be going out every 3 hours due to a timer malfunction with the lighting system and a short in the generator switch.

It was great. I was sitting, minding my own business when all the power goes out. Everyone's puter dies... except mine. People were gathered around my cube commenting that my puter was the only one that didn't die.

Of course, I took this moment to remind them that the reason is because we bought battery backups for all the BT computers and if they wanted to play along with us more in preparedness, they could have had one too...

Wow, that's...uhh, wow. Clevah.

[triadruid.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention that this server does have a UPS/battery backup box that's half as big as it is...but apparently they don't work when the power cable is flaky? I dunno, man. It's all monkeys from here on out...