This company has a big IT shop, and execs decide they can fill empty space in the data center by doing server hosting. Soon, business is booming and the tech staff is seriously overloaded with supporting all the external customers. During a quarterly status meeting, the director in charge of the hosting services was giving a presentation about bookings and profits, says a pilot fish on the scene. One tech asked when he'll hire more people to support the work. The director replied that they've seen the workload increase, and they're in the process of hiring more salesmen as soon as they can!
Spring Back
Daylight-saving time arrives without incident for this IT shop including an old Windows 2000 server. But three days later, users start complaining that the server's time stamps have reverted to standard time. Eighteen hours of checking servers and time sources yielded the answer, reports a pilot fish. The president's son thought he would help out by installing new time-server software on the machine after the March 11 transition date. Only problem is, he didn't check the daylight-saving time box once he installed the application -- hence the reversion.
We Agree
Server has to be taken offline on an emergency basis to fix a major problem and restore corrupted data. The group responsible did a wonderful job of minimizing downtime and keeping everyone informed as to the progress, says a pilot fish there. But once it's all over, one particularly clue-challenged middle manager sends along a request for handling the next crisis: Any chance we can conduct these activities over the weekends? This was not a good thing to have happen during the standard workweek.
That Other Zero
Laptop users at this company are required to have full hard-drive encryption, says a help desk pilot fish. The only change to the user is an extra password to be entered before boot-up, fish says. I took a call from a user who could not log in, so I walked her step by step through each character in the password. When I got to zero, the user interrupted, That's a capital zero, right? Shed been using an uppercase O, even though the instruction page in front of her spelled out "zero".
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