Good Day

My day started out kind of boring. Usual Monday morning paperwork, that kind of thing.

Mid-morning, I tried to update the system firmware on one of my boxen.

At the very end of the update, the system locked up and wouldn't respond. The technician in the computer room tried a few things, but had no luck.

I grabbed a co-worker (4 eyes are better than 2) and we gave it our best to fix it.

Eventually, after exhausting every option we had, we started swapping out parts. Power supply? Nope. Memory and CPU board? Nope. Array Controller? Nope.

Finally, we got down to the system board. That brought it back.

Either my firmware update to the system console killed the system board, or the system board coincidentally fried when I was working on the system.

It must be my Midas Touch.

I had a ball doing all of this. It's been a long time since I got myself elbows deep in a server, and I really enjoy that aspect of IT.

System Administration is a fun way to make a living, but eventually you age yourself out of actually touching the servers. That kind of thing gets left behind so that the technicians can learn their craft. And you start doing things like clustering, high-level system design, and all that.

But it sure is fun to turn screws.