Calling All Super SysAdmins: When Have You Come to the Rescue?

wabbott over 7 years ago 1 minute read time

They say love is a battlefield, but as any SysAdmin knows—so is the data center! With an endless supply of “evil villains,” like zombie VMs, data loss, performance bottlenecks, application downtime, service outages and more, that could be lurking in the dark corners of a data center, you SysAdmins are the first line of defense for today’s businesses and end users. Yes, SysAdmins are truly the unsung heroes of modern business. And as your role continues to evolve with the growth of hyperconvergence, hybrid IT and cloud computing among other new technology trends, so too do the threats and challenges you must defeat day in and day out.

So, to help recognize all of you hero SysAdmins and to start celebrating System Administrator Appreciation Day on Friday, July 29th, we’d like to hear about your greatest SysAdmin moment in history: a time YOU came to the rescue and saved the day. And don’t forget to tell us what your corresponding fictional superhero identity would be—we know you’re out there, Captain Uptime and Incredible Server Girl!

Use the comments section below to share your heroic tale and superhero identity by July 1, and we’ll give you the key to the city, er, I mean 250 thwack points as a token of our appreciation.

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john_k1 over 7 years ago

My favorite superhero job started one night at 9:00 when I received a phone call at home saying that I had to rush
out to a famous resort site 2 hours away and resolve a network down situation. A film crew from Hollywood was filming a movie on the resort’s famous golf course, and they needed to send the next day’s script revisions back and forth to the writers who were back in Hollywood. The scripts, of course, being fairly large documents. I arrived on the site and was taken to a conference room and introduced to the movie’s head of production, who was in as foul of a mood as I
have ever seen a customer. She demanded to know why I hadn’t fixed the problem yet. (I had been on site for less than 5 minutes at this point). I assured her I would get the problem resolved as soon as possible, and placed a call to the
AT&T support group. (AT&T being the ISP and Network monitoring vendor). The tech informed me that he had multiple equipment failures spread throughout the resort (many square miles of property), and started giving me a list of
equipment sites he wanted me to drive to so that I could start working on the various pieces of equipment. It seemed dubious to me that all those pieces of equipment would have failed on the same evening, so I started to think of what
else could cause these symptoms, including the failed equipment. Now this was back in the early days where a dual-DSL internet feed was considered a fast connection. I reasoned that an overload of the bandwidth would not only cause
the failure of trying to transmit large files, but would also interfere with the communications to the various pieces of network equipment, making it look like they had failed, when it was actually a matter of not being able to
communicate to them. So I asked the tech to look at the QOS and see if there was anything eating up the bandwidth of the main DSL connection. He said that yes, he had one user downloading from a music site and 2 users downloading from
pornographic sites. I asked him to blacklist those MAC addresses and to hold until I got back to him. I then explained to the film’s head of production, (who had been standing right in front of me all of this time with a very
impatient expression and attitude), that we had discovered 3 users who were using up all of the bandwidth by downloading off of music and pornographic sites. I told her that the ISP was in the process of cutting off their
connection, and that the network would hopefully be up shortly. At that moment, we heard angry shouts from the conference room next door, which was also reserved for the film crew. I looked at the head of production and shouted out
to the room next door and asked them what the problem was. They replied that they had just been cut off from the network and had lost their connections. I then told the production manager to retry sending her script on her laptop. It
went through in a flash. Her face got red, and she gave a mumbled thank you. She then excused herself and went into the adjoining conference room and closed the door behind her. Needless to say, there were loud words emanating from the
room, and the lady’s language could have put any drunken sailor to shame. The resort's management was thankful beyond words.
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john_k1 over 7 years ago

My favorite superhero job started one night at 9:00 when I received a phone call at home saying that I had to rush
out to a famous resort site 2 hours away and resolve a network down situation. A film crew from Hollywood was filming a movie on the resort’s famous golf course, and they needed to send the next day’s script revisions back and forth to the writers who were back in Hollywood. The scripts, of course, being fairly large documents. I arrived on the site and was taken to a conference room and introduced to the movie’s head of production, who was in as foul of a mood as I
have ever seen a customer. She demanded to know why I hadn’t fixed the problem yet. (I had been on site for less than 5 minutes at this point). I assured her I would get the problem resolved as soon as possible, and placed a call to the
AT&T support group. (AT&T being the ISP and Network monitoring vendor). The tech informed me that he had multiple equipment failures spread throughout the resort (many square miles of property), and started giving me a list of
equipment sites he wanted me to drive to so that I could start working on the various pieces of equipment. It seemed dubious to me that all those pieces of equipment would have failed on the same evening, so I started to think of what
else could cause these symptoms, including the failed equipment. Now this was back in the early days where a dual-DSL internet feed was considered a fast connection. I reasoned that an overload of the bandwidth would not only cause
the failure of trying to transmit large files, but would also interfere with the communications to the various pieces of network equipment, making it look like they had failed, when it was actually a matter of not being able to
communicate to them. So I asked the tech to look at the QOS and see if there was anything eating up the bandwidth of the main DSL connection. He said that yes, he had one user downloading from a music site and 2 users downloading from
pornographic sites. I asked him to blacklist those MAC addresses and to hold until I got back to him. I then explained to the film’s head of production, (who had been standing right in front of me all of this time with a very
impatient expression and attitude), that we had discovered 3 users who were using up all of the bandwidth by downloading off of music and pornographic sites. I told her that the ISP was in the process of cutting off their
connection, and that the network would hopefully be up shortly. At that moment, we heard angry shouts from the conference room next door, which was also reserved for the film crew. I looked at the head of production and shouted out
to the room next door and asked them what the problem was. They replied that they had just been cut off from the network and had lost their connections. I then told the production manager to retry sending her script on her laptop. It
went through in a flash. Her face got red, and she gave a mumbled thank you. She then excused herself and went into the adjoining conference room and closed the door behind her. Needless to say, there were loud words emanating from the
room, and the lady’s language could have put any drunken sailor to shame. The resort's management was thankful beyond words.
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