LaslowNET

It was Tuesday morning, just after the August Long Weekend. I’d spent much of the weekend doing as little as possible, but had a feeling of great dread as I walked in to my office. Maybe it was because things had been running smoothly for weeks without a major problem. Maybe it was because there always seems to be extra work to do after long weekends. Or maybe, just maybe, it was because my iPhone hadn’t been able to connect to our Exchange 2007 server since Saturday morning. I hadn’t been horribly concerned – OWA support was only in testing for our organization and I was the only user.

Sure enough, though, I didn’t even have a chance to sit down at my desk before my phone was ringing with complaints that Outlook was throwing errors saying it couldn’t connect to the Exchange server. I turned on the LCD for my server monitor, and sure enough, the server wasn’t responding. Grabbing my keys, I trundled up to the server room, still unconcerned as the rest of the staff would be heading for a meeting and as such, I’d have an hour to get things sorted out.

When I got to the sever room, I was greeted by the whirring of cooling fan, however the sound was a little off – the pitch was different than normal, and not quite as loud. Glancing at the server rack, my suspicions were confirmed: the server was off.

No problem, I figured, pulling off the front panel of the IBM x3400 to uncover the power button, just need to flick it back on. I pressed the button (note: if you’re here looking for how to find the power button on an x3400, check out this post).

–Click– *WHIRRRRRRRrrrrrr* –Click–

The server had turned off as quickly as it came on. I pressed the power button again, with much the same result. Crap. Maybe this wouldn’t be so fast after all.

Read more after the break.

As the server room was very cramped, I grabbed a cart and hauled the server down the workbench beside my desk. After hooking everything up, I tried again, once more with it spinning up the fans and then powering off immediately.

On a hunch, I pressed the power button more time, but this time held it in.

–Click– *WHHHHIIIRRRRRRRRRRRR*

Sure enough, the server stayed on, and the P.O.S.T. screen came up. Letting go of the power button, the server –Click–’ed off.

Dammit.

Grabbing some scotch tape, I held the power button in again, secured it to the case, and let go. It held. At this point, the uptime and reliability of my server relied on clear plastic sticky tape. Perfect. Grabbing the phone, I called IBM support. And that’s where the real gong show started….

(Continued in Part 2)