Sloth is expensive and infuriating

Gotta match white to white

Annoying? Yes. Infuriating? Absolutely! Being paid to fix said bullshit problem with no fuss: "Shiiiiet, I dont give a fuck, as long as Im paid for and all my expenses are covered."

That has always been my attitude. Money talks.

Feel like alot of this could have been avoid with a text of "send me a pic of the server"

Yep, I can believe this as I have actually driven to a site to plug in a power cable after asking the on-site personnel if it was plugged in and powered on and they replied with a yes and it had lights. Got there and no power cable!

"Have you ensured power is flowing to the unit Saaaaaaar?"

On the bright side . . . frequent flyer miles.

I enjoy your proper ellipsis

realest shit ever

I think this happens in every industry. Insanely relatable.

@Apple solved that problem now we can face time I call them up like

In 1985 I did in-house tech support for HP as a summer job. Before such things were routine, I developed a checklist for the phone call. Which included. 1) Is it turned on? 2) Look at the switch and tell me if you see the light 3) Look at the power cord where it goes in to the machine and tell me if it has fallen out. After asking those questions, about 1/3 of the followup in-person visits were due to the machine not being turned on or plugged in.

Not to be a dick, but that server should have been on a PDU, or the KVM should have its own mainboard and the ability to power-cycle the server. Preferably both.

Way back when I did IT I got a call saying "Printer won't print from the internet." I troubleshot by phone with customer and couldn't fix it so I went on site. No paper in printer. That one's on me. I should have known, I've dealt with people before.

Honestly sounds like a fun excuse to get out of the house provided the company is paying for everything

Would it have been so hard for him to ask for a picture? Yeah I remember stuff like that from before we had cameras in our pockets. But there days, it saves a lot of time and money to just ask for pictures.

I once flew first class same-day, then drove 4 hours just to tighten a loose Neutral wire on a PLC controller.

@Rothmus

Here folks you learn two things. 1 - Hire competent IT workers *near* your server cabinet. 2 - "This could have been a Zoom call"

@Rothmus Why don’t they move the computer closer to the guy who fixes them

I mean, that’s gotta be aggravating, but couldn’t you have FaceTimed with someone?

Bigger question is why don't you have Out of Band management. iDrac and iLO have been standard for 20+ years and vPro is available if you're not speccing proper servers for server workloads...

I believe this is a dramatization but I know this happens all day, every day, everywhere...

@Aristos_Revenge If this guy worked for me and actually got on a flight to press a button, I’d fire him. Call someone, talk to them, have them walk up to the server and press the button. Or, you know, be an idiot and fly out there because you can’t communicate.

It's why we had iDRAC modules in every server. It didn't help when someone had physically unplugged the machine due to careless rack maintenance, but saved a trip the other 95% of the time.

Walking around like that holding your phone out is so strange

While we all knew how it would end, the ending was still hilarious

Not surprising when the "engineers" are indians

The cynic in me wants to say it's staged, but nearly 2 decades of IT has similar experiences carved into my bones.

Back in the 90's I visited one of my Tokyo clients who had sent over an engineer from New York to find out why two of their unix servers couldn't communicate. She had been there a couple of days, no success. I got down under the desk and plugged the interconnect cable back in.

always ask for a picture

True story Call: I need you to go to Edmonton Canada. Do you have a passport? Me: Yes, when do I need to go. Call: Today. Now. Cash register in the proof of concept keeps going down and we can't solve it. Me: ..... ok I guess. Book flight, race to airport to catch flight, fly from south central US state to Houston to catch flight to fly to Edmonton (no direct flights of course). Me: Race to customer, go in look under counter. Find cash drawer isn't secured to bracket with screws. Every time crew member shuts drawer, it hits the power cord and knocks it loose thus shutting off the cash register. Me: .... fixed. Call: You've only been there 5 minutes. Me: Explains situation. Call: Can you please stay 10 days or so to monitor? This is too important to risk. yea, that happened.

Any sysadmin that has sysadmin’ed long enough has experienced this.

Shit KVM if the server has to be powered on for it to work, kinda defeats the purpose. Might be something to do with the fact they ain't servers

If it was a real Dell server you could use the idrac to turn it on

"Here is the rack position, S/N, photo from the DB, and I turned on the blinking LED too, to make it easy - please power cycle THAT server only for me, do not touch anything else. I failed over all of the services to the other HA member." Guess which ones goes down 5min later.

I never use absolutes in IT but I told my boss that I was 99% sure it was a network problem. Management wanted 100% confirmation so they had me fly and then drive another 3 hours out into the field plug in 2 laptops and do an ipconfig.