IT Gone BAD.. The UP's and DOWN's (A System Adminstrator's real nightmare)

There are a very few senario's in which IT infrastructure can get really messed up

You make sure you have all the right things in place so that your Domain server does not go down, But no matter how much you try and cry incidents do happen.

like Senario 1 :-

You have a domain controller machine with Exchange running to protect the machine you have connected a RAID card and attached 4 drives, so that even if 1 drive fails the other drive can take over. How can this server still fail ?

Ans - RAID card crashes

(due to the raid card crash, to your bad luck even the exchange databases get corrupt... and you keep crying why me ? )

1) The domain controller is the most important system in the network, hence it was raided with 4 drives (now how the hell would anyone expect a server with 4 raid drives ever hope the server would crash ?), Let me tell you how, to our bad luck the RAID card crashed, Server went down, exchange databases got corrupt, the only good part was that the exchange database was being backed up, but the weekly exchange was failing.... BAAP RE... now wht ?? Luckly we got the support contract renewed with symantec.. guided us to somehow recover the databases.

Senario 2 :-



You have a bunch of Mexicans coming to cleanup the office over the weekend (who don't know english)

Ans - These guys put high capacity equipment for carpet cleaning which trips the main power supply (which in-turn trips off half of the machines within the server room)

(The worst thing is that your not in office and the internet line is also down due to the power problem and you can't even connect to the network to take a look at what went down and why ? also for some reason you feel there is internet connectivity issue)

Senario 3:-

Well this senario may not apply to you and not that serious if you don't know about it

Ans - Exchange databases have a limit set for around xx GB, after which the server automatically unmounts the database from the exchange till you troubleshoot and figure out that your f****** exchange server database has gone over xx GB


just happened once after the h**k that was applied to the exchange server to change the default size for the exchange from xx GB to yy GB but to our bad luck it went over yy GB limit. but er figured this out and got it fixed.


All incidents are either personal experience or helping out friends and some details have been widthheld by friends.

This is known as 'A System Adminstrator's real nightmare' as we would never get sleep without getting these fixed.

3 comments:

  1. well... nice post buddy!.. I'm kinda havin a Dejavu... those scenarios seem to be sooo familiar!

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  2. when users (that we care less for) and their systems (that we care somewhat more for, coz they don't cuss us) pass out from these so-called nightmares,we the sysadmins come in (when we're employed for the task i.e.) If you think realising dreams is tough, try taming a nightmare into a dream (working solution..nothing fancy) like a sysadmin.

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  3. @ Richard, thanks for the post, Well you may have come across some similar situations may be even tried to help with one or two :)

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