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

  • 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…

  • Goodbye Google Sync

    I thought I had the bugs ironed out using Google Sync for the Blackberry but today was the last straw. While prepping for a meeting, I went to verify the location and discovered that, despite the fact that this event had existed, without problems, in all 3 places (Blackberry, Google Calendar and Outlook), for weeks,…

  • A fifth cause of burnout

    I was reminded today of a fifth reason people get burned out doing tech support. Unrealistic expectations. For example, when your users have a problem with technology that isn’t something you support, but which they still expect you to take care of for them. In some cases that can be personal tech like an iPod…

  • |

    Promising new blog

    Ian Landsman tried to launch heldesktalk.com as a forum to discuss help desk issues, but when that proved to be too much of a challenge for the amount of time he had, he brought in his dad to turn it into a blog: The site will be original writing, but will also link to ongoings…

  • | |

    Linked – Why clicking on pop-up tech support ad could cost you

    One of the best things to protect yourself, Jutras says, is to take your computer offline and then contact the actual provider. Also, do not click on links or documents you don’t recognize. “A legitimate company won’t call you and ask for money,” says Jutras. This is really becoming a thing, so let’s talk about…

  • Alex sees problems ahead

    Alex Scoble is using my last post as an example of what he thinks will be a growing problem with wireless gadgets, overcrowded airwaves. If my experience is at all common, I’d say it’s something to be concerned about. I don’t have that many wireless devices in my house going at once. At most a…

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.)