Sitting at home one evening, sysadmin pilot fish gets a frantic call from the manufacturing plant where he’s the only person doing on-site IT support.

The call is from the night supervisor, who tells fish, “All the computers have stopped working.”

Fish knows that’s not very likely, so he presses for details. Turns out the PCs are all reporting that they can’t communicate with the database server.

Fish tells the supervisor to have the security guards let him into the server room, and soon the supervisor is describing every monitor message, blinking light or other indicator he can see.

The server is clearly down, so fish talks the supervisor through power-cycling it. It starts to come back up, but dies again halfway through boot-up with no error messages.

To read this article in full, please click here