You know, this all makes me feel kind of good about how things have been going at my place of work.
I work at an ISP that also does web hosting. There's one fellow who seriously overestimates his level of skill.
The systems are designed so that if any random server fails, generally a quick reboot will fix it. Everything is redundantly-clustered to a fare-thee-well.
This fellow managed to get it into his head that because the servers are running Solaris, they should never be rebooted. Because, you know, Solaris isn't Windows.
So he spent two hours wrestling with this one server over how, because of a bug in NFS, one filesystem doesn't mount correctly. He unmounted, remounted, unmounted, remounted, and unmounted one filesystem on this box over and over. Because, you know, Solaris never needs to be rebooted.
Eventually he gave up and rebooted the system. And by golly, everything worked fine after that. Because the system was designed so that rebooting a server (which was, y'know, Server 3 of 5) would generally work out right.
So because this guy tried to be a hero instead of applying the quick'n'easy fix, a whole bunch of people got bizarre broken results for a couple of hours. Fortunately, those bizarre broken results happened during the dead of night, and would've been easily fixed by the user hitting reload. But still--he just Didn't Get It. Because of his strange attraction to Not Rebooting Servers, he caused problems for a couple of hours, where taking the easy route out would have fixed everything.
The next morning, he talked about the problems he'd had, and how rebooting the server fixed it. The knowledgeable people he worked with all said, "Yup, you should've rebooted it first."
All of us were models of calmness next to how Christian Bale reacted. But we all would've been within our rights to tear him a new asshole on that account.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-05 01:05 pm (UTC)I work at an ISP that also does web hosting. There's one fellow who seriously overestimates his level of skill.
The systems are designed so that if any random server fails, generally a quick reboot will fix it. Everything is redundantly-clustered to a fare-thee-well.
This fellow managed to get it into his head that because the servers are running Solaris, they should never be rebooted. Because, you know, Solaris isn't Windows.
So he spent two hours wrestling with this one server over how, because of a bug in NFS, one filesystem doesn't mount correctly. He unmounted, remounted, unmounted, remounted, and unmounted one filesystem on this box over and over. Because, you know, Solaris never needs to be rebooted.
Eventually he gave up and rebooted the system. And by golly, everything worked fine after that. Because the system was designed so that rebooting a server (which was, y'know, Server 3 of 5) would generally work out right.
So because this guy tried to be a hero instead of applying the quick'n'easy fix, a whole bunch of people got bizarre broken results for a couple of hours. Fortunately, those bizarre broken results happened during the dead of night, and would've been easily fixed by the user hitting reload. But still--he just Didn't Get It. Because of his strange attraction to Not Rebooting Servers, he caused problems for a couple of hours, where taking the easy route out would have fixed everything.
The next morning, he talked about the problems he'd had, and how rebooting the server fixed it. The knowledgeable people he worked with all said, "Yup, you should've rebooted it first."
All of us were models of calmness next to how Christian Bale reacted. But we all would've been within our rights to tear him a new asshole on that account.