A lesson in humility from Sidney...
So, we had to go in to the shop today to do some off-hours work. We needed to unplug half of our production environment and move the electrical cables around. We also needed to rerun the ethernet cables.
Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, we had to be extremely careful so as to not affect the rest of the environment. One wrong move and we could have blown the breakers and really screwed some stuff up.
So, everything went perfectly and I was just buttoning up the last of the ethernet interfaces when somebody from the help desk came bursting in. She got a message that all the servers had crashed. Needless to say, my stomach dropped to my feet, but I was positive that I hadn't done anything that could have possibly crashed any servers, much less ALL of them. None of MY servers were down...
After a couple of minutes they determined that the servers hadn't crashed, they were just offline... sounds like a network issue. Uh oh. Even though I was absolutely convinced that my network was completely isolated and impossible to impact the rest of the business, I went ahead and took a look at my configuration. Sure enough, two of the cables were in the wrong ports.
Ok, that's not good for me, but surely this couldn't have affected everybody else, right? Wrong! As it turns out, and unbeknownst to us, the main network somehow runs through our switches! I was shocked, stunned, and I felt pretty stupid - why didn't I take a second look at those numbers?? I NEVER make this kind of mistake.
At any rate, 2 minutes later all joy was restored and everything was working as expected again. The only real victim here is my pride. My buddy told me that this was a good lesson in humility and maybe I should try to learn something from it. I disagree! I'm sure this was simply some kind of cosmic, karmic interference.
However, I'm equally convinced that this karmic retribution was incorrectly assigned as I certainly haven't done anything to deserve it!
So, now I feel like an idiot. Please mark your calendars appropriately.
Oh, and don't bother buying my house. It's already in the hands of the "we buy your house people", so I don't care if it ever sells. How do you like them apples??
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4 comments:
Well Karma is a bitch... and I'm sure you've done SOMETHING somewhere once to deserve it... that or you just needed something to kick your pride and arrogance down a few notches. :-)
You don't make mistakes often, but there is precedent. I seem to recall an occasion where you rebooted the HR server by mistake. Remember that? A trend in the making, perhaps? Maybe you got a little too cocky? Maybe you were thinking about that novel you should be writing? I don't know, a new chapter, about how the hero admin realizes his fallibility? Perhaps he grows a little from the experience? Maybe even cracks a slow grin in the direction of his critic? I look forward to reading it.
it's marked down in the history books. :)
P.S. It looks like you may have lost your audience... maybe its due to lack of posts?
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