Friday, October 17, 2008

Before you know it - it happens and the fun begins

Today started out as your typical sleepy "TGIF" Friday. I drive for an hour one way to get to work so by the time I get here I am happy to arrive. I sat down, checked my voice mail to see if anyone reported any problems and then I fired up IE beta 8 to view the work order queue to see if anything new had popped up over night. I noticed that the Intranet site tab was not connecting so I started to investigate. I soon discovered that not only was the website not coming up but I could not ping the server either. I went to the server room and the Compaq Presario server which sits on the floor was not showing any lights on the two ancient scsi drives. I rebooted the server and still could not get a ping response and I noticed that the server appeared to be in an endless reboot loop because of the beeps and the cd rom and floppy get getting pinged.

Since the server is so old and I doubt I would ever find parts for it I went to plan B which was to relocate all the Intranet files to one of my other Dell rackmount servers which are new and fully updated. Luckily for me there was no SQL or MyPHP or PHP databases to deal with and all the HTML files were all static files. All I had to do was install and configure IIS 6.0 on the server of choice and copy the files over to the wwwroot directory. I did have on hiccup in that I kept trying to point my web browser to the wrong IP address and could not figure out why I could not access the web site. I had a good friend of mine who used VPN to access my server and he started asking me what IP address I was pointing my browser to. When I told him the wrong one he laughed at me and set my feet (browser) on the correct path. Once I had that figured out we were good to go.

What should have taken all of one hour actually wound up taking me several hours. This reminded me that while I am in the habit of getting real deep with my troubleshooting skills it is always prudent to start out at square one and make sure the simple things are not ignored. Most of the time a computer problem is just a very simple thing and we I.T. professionals have a habit of making things too complicated.

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