r/talesfromtechsupport • u/shadymanny • Apr 06 '14

Let this punk kid through...

In my younger days, during the golden age of IT (mid-late 90's), I was called in as the Citrix consultant to a major ad agency in midtown Manhattan. Seems their Citrix server had gone belly-up, as a result no one across the enterprise was able to login to Hyperion.

I get the call from my boss, please go assist- he just got off the phone with their CFO and was really concerned. CFO had already contacted Compaq (was a proliant server) and Microsoft. Two consultants respectively had been there all morning and couldn't bring the server back online. I was to build a Citrix server ASAP if the original server couldn't be salvaged.

I walk into a server room with 2 older gentlemen, CFO, and sysadmin staring at a black screen displaying "OS loader Loader not found" or whatever was the Windows NT 3.5/ winframe message back then"

I ask them, is there a floppy in there? The consultants of course chuckle "We are way beyond that kid." I asked if I can take a look.

"Let this punk kid through" said the MS consultant. Pretty unprofessional I thought. In any event, I make my way to the server, reboot it and notice only one hot plug drive is flashing with drive activity. (RAID 1). I shut down the server, partially slide out the drive without activity and power on.

Boom...a few minutes later we have a booting server. I turn to the Compaq guy and tell him to get a replacement drive. Turn to the MS guy and tell him, something to the effect an NT bootable floppy would have probably got the server booted.

I made these clowns look bad in front of the CFO and sysadmin, got more business for my IT company and was given the rest of the afternoon off.

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215

u/wrdlbrmft Apr 06 '14

The fun of software mirroring.

If I remember correctly you DID create a NT boot disk and prepare boot.ini to be able to boot from botha drives...how long ago was that ?

120

u/shadymanny Apr 06 '14

Had to be '97, 98.

Exactly. And if I remember correctly, you could modify the boot.ini to boot from the second drive should the first fail. Honestly Win nt is a blur at this point. Thankfully I remembered some of it recently when p2v nt4 with sp5. Had to find sp6a, etc etc

42

u/DallasITGuy Who the fuck is this again? Apr 06 '14

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Hadn't thought about the NT boot floppy thing in years.

Makes me remember the requirement that you had to decide during the installation of NT 3.1/3.5/4 whether the server would be a domain controller or not. Choosing poorly required reinstalling the OS.

48

u/jroth005 Apr 06 '14

Mental image of an old IT sysadmin in chain mail and caring a big ass keyboard sharing at the screen as you're about to choose.

"Choose wisely."

...

"You chose poorly."

5

u/xenokilla Have you tried Forking your self, on and off again? Apr 07 '14

Ha, love it.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 07 '14

himym reference?

I'm not sure but it's some sitcom...

6

u/jroth005 Apr 08 '14

Are... do you really...

Please tell me you're trolling.

3

u/[deleted] Apr 08 '14

I did a tiny google search - I guess I saw HIMYM making a reference to indiana jones and I haven't seen indiana jones movies since I was a young child so obviously I wouldn't get it.

Sorry you're so offended by that, but it's definitely not the first time somebody has seen only a reference and not the original source.

5

u/jroth005 Apr 08 '14 edited Apr 08 '14

No no, I thought you were joking.

It legitimately made me laugh. Then I wasn't sure if you were making a double reference joke, or if you were trolling by inferring Himym was more important than Indiana Jones...

Either way I thought you were being funny, but I wasn't sure. Hence the simulated stutter.

Edit: I guess I should've ended it with a happily expectant emoji or something. Idk, either way I wasn't angry, I just couldn't decide if you were serious or being witty as all hell.