On Call Change is a constant – and so is On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs every Friday to share your tech support tales.
This week, meet a reader we will Regomize as “Carl” who in the late 1990s worked at a university and made the move from the desktop support team to the network management group.
“Just before I started, we installed two new servers running Novell NetWare,” Carl told On Call.
Software running on the new machines soon started to lock up and reboots and reinstalls became frequent chores, but a full fix proved elusive. Tempers frayed as email faltered, network drives became unavailable, and logins lagged.
Carl watched from the sidelines because only the two lead network admins were allowed to get hands-on with the boxes to find a fix.
Their efforts proved futile, so the university escalated the matter to Novell and the server maker.
The mess eventually landed in Carl’s lap because he got the job of informing users of the latest outage and reloading software to effect a temporary fix.
This made Carl less than popular around the office – just what a new hire needs.
Between fixes, Carl started to investigate the servers and before long found log files that recorded a long, long list of memory errors that even named the actual DIMM as the source.
“I called the lead admin and said I’d found the problem,” Carl told On Call. “At first she was skeptical but said she’d have a look.”
The lead admin asked Carl how long he had known about the memory errors.
“About four minutes,” he replied, then watched as she summoned the IT director to show him the error messages.
And then, without a word, the lead admin and IT director walked away, leaving Carl thinking he’d made a career-threatening mistake.
Thankfully, he was wrong. Colleagues soon let him know that the server maker was flying in replacement memory, along with a technician to install it. They both arrived that very night and solved the problem.
“I received a thank-you from the director and the lead admin,” Carl told On Call.
Around a month later, the lead admin resigned to become a yoga instructor, which – given her failure to spot the logs a noob found without trying – may have been a sound career move!
Have your tech support feats prompted a colleague to rethink their career? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can tell your story on a future Friday. ®