Bad Surprises

I was back at my old job today, preparing for what I hope is one of the last phone company bill runs I ever have to do, when suddenly, at about 5:45 on a Friday afternoon,* the billing server dropped dead.

My first thought was Do we have backups? Yes, we have backups.**  Okay then, let's haul the server out, plug it into a monitor (the computer room is not terribly well organised), and see what we get.

After a certain amount of fiddling I managed to get a BIOS screen up, and select the boot menu, whereupon the server spontaneously rebooted.  I tried this several times with identical results; in fact, leaving the server alone would result in a boot-crash-boot-crash cycle just like my unlamented Compaq notebook.

There are four lights on the front of the server that indicate a POST code, so I hit Dell's website for the user manual and looked it up.  Running down the list: CPU failure, memory failure, hard drive failure.***

USB failure.

Swapped the keyboard to a different USB port and it worked perfectly.

* There's some sort of physical law that requires this.
**  It would take a couple of days to rebuild the system and restore the backups, but at least we had backups. From the previous day, I should add.
*** This is the mission-critical server that was spec'd with only one disk drive, so my first thought was exactly that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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