Anyone in IT knows that coffee is an indispensable aid in daily operations, but as N.D. writes, sometimes the working man's best friend just might be his enemy...
The other day I received a frantic call from "Bubba", one of my company's system administrators. "Bubba" was impossible to forget, he was so big and burley that he looked more like a cartoon than a man. I could hear him jumping up and down over the phone as he hollered that their server had begun randomly rebooting itself.
Immediately I thought it might be the Windows reboot on error function, so I painstakingly spent the next few hours analyzing the logs and checked everything I knew. I finally was able to determine that it only happened in the mornings, but couldn't figure out why.
I decided the only way to deduce what was going on was to be on-site when it happened, so I parked myself next to the server, which was located in the claustrophobic system administrator's office. I felt like someone who was asked to share a refrigerator box with a gorilla.
We spent a few minutes huddled up next to the stack of equipment, waiting for the mysterious reboot-gremlin to appear.
"There it goes!" Bubba bellowed, waving his log-like arms around in what little free space was left in the room.
The UPS beeped and, sure enough, the server rebooted and then came back up. His phone lit up with blue and red lights as though it was New Year's Eve and I listened to him field a slew of calls from irate users, most of whom he quelled by saying, "We're working on it."
I had to admit I was stumped. This gremlin seemed impossible to catch. "Watch," he said, reaching across the desk to pour himself another cup of coffee. "It will happen again in a few minutes."
A proverbial light went off in my head and I followed the slinky cord as it exited the coffee pot and disappeared under the desk. It was then I noticed that the pot was plugged into the UPS. Whenever the heating element kicked on, it would overload the UPS and cause a power interrupt.
I picked up the coffee pot, walked across the room (two or three whole steps) and plugged it into the opposite wall. After that, the morning phone calls stopped.
Who knew that, in fact, coffee could be both the solution -- and the cause -- of all of IT's problems?
