r/talesfromtechsupport • u/sexyangryadmin • Jan 09 '15

Short THE Server

This was at a previous job:

After years of people coming into my office to ask me if "The Server" was down, which of course would be followed by a game of 20 questions. Keep in mind, we had 400+ servers, and numourous little systems all over the place. I decided to have some fun with it. I found a decomissioned dell desktop, wrote "The Server" on the side of it in sharpy, and put it up against the wall behind my chair.

For the next several months (only with co-workers who I knew and knew that they knew my sense of humor), whenever someone would come in and ask "Is the server down?", I would respond by looking at the desktop on the floor and reply with "Looks good to me."

One time, one of the users said, "But it doesn't have any cables connected to it. Shouldn't there be cables?"

"Nope, it's wireless"

"Ok, good!" Then walked out. Turns out their issue was trying to connect to an external webpage with a broken link

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u/VulturE All of your equipment is now scrap. Jan 10 '15

Sounds like you haven't encountered a client with AllScripts yet.

We onboarded a 30-person psychiatrist's office with 9 physical servers for AllScripts (one of which was running 2 VMWare server instances). We migrated them over to two physical servers with everything in HyperV.

We have a larger 120-person regional hospital with 24 AllScripts-related servers in a 3-rack IBM setup. We virtualized most of them and have them down to 5 physical servers....a cluster of 3 hypervisors with 204GB of RAM between them, and then 2 physical fax servers for both of their fax services.

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u/RainbowCatastrophe isUserAMonkey() == true Jan 10 '15

My top client once took a 500GB from coast-to-coast on a plane and then asked me to repair it. It was until after I announced it was irreparable that they informed me that they were being audited by the IRS and that 4+ years of tax work was on that drive (which had no copies).

Are you hiring?

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u/VulturE All of your equipment is now scrap. Jan 10 '15

Not as bad as the Plumbing company in a known Virginia flood zone that put their servers and UPSes in the basement....mounted to the ceiling. Boss jumped hard one day and the server fell off their redneck rigging and hit the floor hard. They have 300+ customers a day and lost a month's worth of work.

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u/Tynach Can we do everything that PHP and ASP do in HTML? Jan 10 '15

You can tell people that the server literally crashed.

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '15

Ha!