Bad IT Day

What’s a bad IT day? How about a day where you have more servers being wonky than you have server admins available to deal with them? We had that one afternoon this week. A voice mail server off-line, a Blackberry Server running at about 30-40 minute delay, and a whole bunch of users have some sort of unidentified problem connecting to the SAN. Good times, good times. 🙂

Naturally, in the course of investigating the problems communicating with the SAN we’re actually discovering a bunch of other issues that are causing similar symptoms but are not the same problem. Some folks have a delay opening programs or working with programs that have ties to their home drives. Unfortunately, a “slow” computer is a ridiculously difficult thing to troubleshoot, because of the number of different things that can cause that symptom. A bunch of folks getting the same problem in one week would seem to signify some sort of network issue, especially when the SAN is brand new, but the more people we look at in depth we just end up with a different problem for each of them! So while one was fixed by changing some applications settings to point the their C: drive instead of the home drive, another user had a voice recognition process that kept hanging up, while yet another had a rogue process being blocked by our firewall, but still tying up CPU cycles. That only leaves us with about 20 more people with slow computers to work on next week. 🙂

I was so glad to see this week end!

Tags: TechSupport, IT, Troubleshooting

Similar Posts

  • | |

    Failure to Communicate

    This is a bit of a follow-up to a post a few days ago about whether having an open ticketing system would help with the communications between techs and the users they support. As I mentioned there, and talked more about in the comments, when you have systemic failure to communicate, it’s much more than…

  • Blackberry, etc.

    Just yesterday some of us were gathered in the area of the helpdesk, discussing the NTP/RIM lawsuit and what the firm might have to do if the Blackberry service does, in fact, get shut down. The agreement was that we’d end up blowing a big chunk of IS budget rolling out Windows Mobile devices. One…

  • Never fails

    Yes, you say something nice about a service, lots of other people start talking about it, and they start having problems. As useful as I think Twitter can be, currently the Gtalk IM function is completely unreliable, which means using my blackberry to send updates and get notifications doesn’t really work. I have to be…

  • A perfect example

    I’ve mentioned before why I think measuring the effectiveness of your help desk folks by looking at the number of tickets they work alone is dumb. This week, I had a perfect example. We had one of our pool laptops lose a hard drive this week. The replacement drive came in Thursday late in the…

  • The dirty details

    While still trying to keep a bit of mystery about where I currently work, and where I’m going to be working, there are a few things that I find very interesting about my upcoming job-switch that I want to share and discuss. Mostly, I’m interested in how much of my experience can be extrapolated out…

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

To respond on your own website, enter the URL of your response which should contain a link to this post's permalink URL. Your response will then appear (possibly after moderation) on this page. Want to update or remove your response? Update or delete your post and re-enter your post's URL again. (Find out more about Webmentions.)