Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed
Epic late-night road trip would have been awesome if not for a secret change of plans
Who, Me? Welcome once again to Who, Me? The Register's reader-contributed column in which you admit to the occasional failure, and we celebrate your escapes.
This week, meet a reader we don't need to Regomize because his name is Dave and he is happy for us to use it.
Dave sent a tale of his time working for a company that operated a PC he was told simply had to run 24x7. No ifs, no buts. No change windows allowed. This PC would always run.
The machine ran SCO Unix (which later became the subject of perplexingly lengthy litigation) and two workloads. One was a reporting app. The other was a program that took the horrible format of the reporting app's output and translated it into something other software could consume.
If those reports weren't reformatted, they couldn't be processed and people would get mad.
This being the 1990s, the essential machine was equipped with a hard disk drive that was making the sort of noises that suggested it would be prudent to replace it sooner rather than later.
Dave learned of the disk's declining health late on Friday after what he described as "a brain-melting 80-hour week with a lot of European travel involved." He was therefore more than a little fatigued but still felt he could replace the disk, and that a brief outage on Friday night was tolerable and preferable to dealing with a longer and unplanned problem in the future.
To get the PC back into robust condition, he decided to clone its hard drive onto fresh hardware, then swap the old disk for the new.
Did we mention Dave was really tired?
Turns out he was so tired he flubbed the job and overwrote the source drive instead of cloning it.
The essential PC was now dead.
But all was not lost! Dave knew that another PC in a different office did the same job and was therefore configured in identical fashion. If he could get to that office and clone that drive, he could save the day.
Which was a great plan except for the fact that the other office was four hours away by car.
Dave stocked up on energy drinks, hit the road, made it to the other office, convinced security to let him in, and cloned the drive properly.
- Developers feared large chaps carrying baseball bats could come to kneecap their ... test account?
- Life lesson: Don't delete millions of accounts on the same day you go to the dentist
- Brackets go there? Oops. That's not where I used them and now things are broken
- Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work
He left that office at around 9PM, reached the first office and its essential PC at 1AM, plugged in the drive and watched it come to life.
At around 2AM he reached home and told us he "slept the sleep of kings."
On Monday morning, Dave was summoned to a meeting at which, thankfully, the essential PC's downtime was not on the agenda.
But its ultimate demise was.
"We were told about plans to replace the PC and the reporting application," he told Who, Me?
The move happened three weeks later, meaning Dave realized the drive he fixed would probably have lasted and his Friday night trek was futile. And even if the box had broken down, its absence would probably have been tolerated given the imminent migration.
Ain't IT grand?
Have you tried to maintain tech but instead made a problem worse? Or been needlessly proactive? Click here to send us an email with your story so we can share it on a future Monday. ®