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

  • A little explanation

    A little explanation today, as background to the bizarre fax we got this morning. We don’t have a traditional ISP, we have a company that we are partnered with, who provided a consultant about 6 years ago to put together our computer network. (Before I worked here). We’ve simply thrown up a fractional T1 between…

  • Classic Mistake

    Kevin Devin posted something today about his workplace, wondering if the snake of Corporate IT was eating it’s own tail. When I read his story, one part jumped out at me immediately. Here was a classic example of tech support folks not having the authority, or tools, to correct a problem for a user. If…

  • |

    The Process, not the Results

    One of the bigger adjustments from working tech support to working Litigation Support is the focus. When you’re doing help desk stuff, the focus is on finding a solution, and getting folks back to work. When you’re doing Litigation Support, especially when it’s involves case work, it is all about following the process, and ignoring…

  • Supporting everything

    Last week I was informed that I’ll be getting a new piece of hardware. Actually, I’ll be getting a second PC, because we’re going to be testing and then partially rolling out a new version of software, and since we will have to support users running both versions for awhile as the roll out moves…

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.)