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!

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